Xref: utzoo news.groups:8433 news.admin:5270 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!apple!chuq From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin Subject: Re: Proposed OFFICIAL Newsgroup Creation/Deletion Guidelines Message-ID: <27870@apple.Apple.COM> Date: 26 Mar 89 05:48:04 GMT References: <37740@bbn.COM> <27806@apple.Apple.COM> <5134@cbnews.ATT.COM> Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps Lines: 76 >I don't like percentages; there are too many loopholes. percentages are admittedly not perferct. My claim is imply that they are better than pure number boundaries. Perfection is impossible. I'm simply suggesting something that I feel is better. >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. This is a boundary condition. Rules invariably break down at boundary conditions. I could plug any numbers into any voting formula and you could come up with a boundary condition that makes it look bad. So by definition, any set of rules is bad because there's a perturbance at the boundary condition. The idea is to compare the rule against reality and not argue the theories of the edge. In practice, It's very unlikely (I can't think of a case) where the voting is that low *and* that close. Looking back on the last year or so of newsgroup votes, I couldn't find a case that would have been screwed up by the boundary conditions I defined. Therefore, I don't see a problem with the boundary, since in practice it'll never hurt anyone. A second analysis of your case is this: if you can only get 29 votes to save a group, then by definition it doesn't have enough votes to be created (if this were a creation vote instead of a deletion vote) and therefore what you're really showing is a lack of support for the group. The voting has already been biased fairly heavily towards the no-delete side -- you're simply arguing that it should be biased even further, and I don't buy that. >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: There is another reason, which you evidently haven't heard my lecture on over the last eternity here on the net: 5) You do not want an overly complex namespace. The reason you don't want an overly complex namespace is because it breeds confusion in the naive user. There are two problems with leaving moribund newsgroups around: o A naive user will tend to post to that newsgroup assuming there's an audience. Since the group is moribund, there is by definition a very small audience, causing the user to get a non-existant or minimal response. You end up with either an unhappy user or a posting that gets sent out multiple times trying to find an audience, negatively impacting net volume. o The larger the namespace, the harder it is to figure out what the appropriate newsgroup to post is. In many cases, it's ambiguous what groups a posting belongs. In an efficient namespace, there would be a single appropriate newsgroup for every posting, and cross-posting would be unneccessary. USENET is anything but efficient, and perfect efficiency is an unattainable goal anyway, but we should tweak the namespace towards efficiency where reasonable. This includes both creating newsgroups to handle subjects that aren't covered *and* deleting newsgroups that no longer have a purpose. Think of a moribund newsgroup as USENET's appendix. Generally, you don't see it, you don't think about it, you don't notice it. Every so often, however, something goes wrong with it and then you have problems. With USENET, it is fairly trivial to remove the appendix before it does go wrong, leaving you with a healthier organism in the end. If it took major surgery, I wouldn't recommend this action -- but all it takes is an agreement when it's time to go. If only I'd had that option with my appendix.... Chuq Von Rospach -*- Editor,OtherRealms -*- Member SFWA chuq@apple.com -*- CI$: 73317,635 -*- Delphi: CHUQ -*- Applelink: CHUQ [This is myself speaking. No company can control my thoughts.] USENET: N. A self-replicating phage engineered by the phone company to cause computers to spend large amounts of their owners budget on modem charges.