Xref: utzoo news.groups:8429 news.admin:5266 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!cbnews!wbt From: wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin Subject: Re: Proposed OFFICIAL Newsgroup Creation/Deletion Guidelines Message-ID: <5134@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 26 Mar 89 00:52:56 GMT References: <1634@ncar.ucar.edu> <37740@bbn.COM> <27806@apple.Apple.COM> Reply-To: wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 85 In article <27806@apple.Apple.COM> chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: > >Hmm. A thought just occurred to me. The "100 more yes than no votes" has >always been somewhat controversial because the absolute number is relatively >easy to overcome. Thinking about it, a better way is to define succeed/fail >in terms of percentages. How about this: > >o A group creation vote succeeds if 67% of the vote is for creation. > >o A group deletion vote succeeds if 67% of the vote is for deletion. > >o Any vote with less than 150 total votes will be considered failed for > lack of interest. I don't like percentages; there are too many loopholes. Consider trying to remove a low-volume group: if the vote goes: Yes=120, No=29 ("Yes" means kill the group) the group stays; less than 150 votes. If, however, you get one more "No" vote, the group is removed. If you think the number of voters is low, you might be better off not voting. I've brought this up before, and gotten a rousing "yawn" in response. Why vote against a group ? I can only think of a few reasons: 1) You think the naming of the group is inappropriate: e.g., sci.humor 2) The number of groups in existence threatens to exceed the capacity of your site's news software. (this is apparently a problem to many non-UN*X sites) 3) The group, by its very nature, is illegal or encourages illegal activity (e.g., rec.terrorism, talk.burglary) such that sites carrying it could incur liability. 4) The group is redundant, the topic being already covered by another group whose volume is not excessive. (e.g., news.announce.important.aprilfirst) IMHO, a lack of established demand or volume is insufficient for a "no" vote; after all, if there's no interest, the group won't get 100 votes. I would hazard that a sizeable fraction, and in many instances, the majority, of "no" votes are cast for reasons I consider inappropriate: 1) "I don't think this topic should be discussed on the net" 2) "There's no point in discussing that" 3) "I consider the topic to be offensive" 4) Racist/sexist/political motivations (i.e., an attempt to repress views one is opposed to) It is, of course, impossible to filter "good" no votes from "bad" ones. I think that, for group retention, all that should be required is some minimum monthly volume; perhaps 15 posting per month, maybe less (remember that some moderated groups are digested, so there's only one posting per day, and none on weekends). I further suggest that , for an existing group, the only legitimate reason to vote "no" is lack of namespace; the other three "valid" reasons I enumerated above should have been addressed when the group was created. If lack of namespace is not a real problem for the bulk of the net, perhaps "no" votes could be disallowed. For group creation, I would suggest that the current guidelines, 100 more "Yes" than "No" votes, are appropriate, but could perhaps be amended to include "in any case, if the total number of "Yes" votes exceeds 200, the vote passes." That is, if enough people want the group as proposed, it should be created, regardless of negative votes. This would further allow a "fast" vote, useful for timely topics; for example, comp.sys.next, as I recall, received over 300 "yes" votes in one week; as soon as 200 "yeses" were received, the vote-taker could call for creation. ------------------------------ valuable coupon ------------------------------- Bill Thacker att!cbnews!wbt "C" combines the power of assembly language with the flexibility of assembly language. Disclaimer: Farg 'em if they can't take a joke ! ------------------------------- clip and save --------------------------------