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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!inco!mack
From: mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Proposed OFFICIAL Newsgroup Creation/Deletion Guidelines
Message-ID: <4803@inco.UUCP>
Date: 26 Mar 89 18:10:55 GMT
References: <1634@ncar.ucar.edu> <3088@alembic.UUCP> <574@peritek.UUCP>
Reply-To: mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Followup-To: news.groups
Organization: McDonnell Douglas-INCO, McLean, VA
Lines: 44

In article <574@peritek.UUCP> dig@peritek.UUCP (Dave Gotwisner) writes:
>In article <3088@alembic.UUCP>, csu@alembic.UUCP (Dave Mack) writes:
>> In article <1634@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
>> [Rules for newsgroup creation - well-stated, no particular surprises.]
>> >
>> >	RULES FOR DELETING A USENET GROUP
>> >
>> 
>> I suggest that a reasonable basis for newsgroup removal would be that
>> the group has had fewer than some threshhold number of articles per
>> month (5-10?) for the preceding three months, as measured at three
>> "hub" sites (say rutgers, uunet and decwrl?) The hub sites must, of
>> course, carry the group in question over the measurement period. This
>> requirement would have to be met before the removal vote could be taken.
>> 
>
>I read this as automated group removal or having a program determine when
>a group should be removed, and then start the discussion off.  

No. Read the last sentence of what I wrote. The low volume requirement
is a prerequisite for *taking a vote on removal.* Beyond that, you
would also need to have removal proposed by someone, a discussion period,
and a vote.

>I would suggest that we leave group removal up to the site administrators
>to determine which groups they don't want rather than do a blanket for
>the net as a whole.  If space/inodes are a problem for some systems, they
>could manage the removal of the group on their system, rather than try
>something on a net-wide basis which may cause more problems than it would
>solve.

I would prefer this solution too, but if we are going to have some
guidelines for globally rmgrouping, we should try to reach an agreement
on what those guidelines are. Guidelines that half the net disagree
with are probably worse than none at all. 

What we are really talking about are guidelines for removal of a group
from the canonical list of "real" newsgroups. No one can force a news
admin to remove a group at his site if he doesn't want to. There are
valid reasons for trimming down the official newsgroups list, even if
it's only to keep the size of a checkgroups message reasonable.

-- 
Dave Mack