Xref: utzoo news.groups:8493 news.admin:5291 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!uxc!iuvax!rutgers!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: <5153@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 27 Mar 89 17:15:05 GMT References: <37740@bbn.COM> <27806@apple.Apple.COM> <5134@cbnews.ATT.COM> <27870@apple.Apple.COM> Reply-To: wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 88 In article <27870@apple.Apple.COM> chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: >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. Understood. >>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. That's true, but this particularly boundary condition sits right in the middle of the range of voting outcomes. >In practice, It's very unlikely (I can't think of a case) where >the voting is that low *and* that close. The vote for talk.politics.guns, posted last week, came in 122 to 20, as I recall; it would have failed your criteria, but passed if 8 more "No's" had been received. I'd rather opt for BC's that are truly at the boundaries. Fore example, how about "At least 100 more Yes than No votes, and Yes must comprise at least 67% of the vote." Then 122 to 20 passes; 99 to 0 fails; 200 to 50 passes, but 201 to 101 fails. Thus, for a "hot" group (one receiving lots of votes), it reduces to "67% of the vote must be "Yes"", while for a small group, it can never result in a situation where more No votes could have caused the vote to pass. For these numbers, the boundary lies at 200 Yes, 100 No; that vote meets both criteria. With fewer than 300 votes, all you have to worry about is 100 more Yes than No; with more, all you have to worry about is 67% Yes. Of course, the 100-vote margin and the 67% figure can be changed to taste; this will simply move the boundary. >>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. Hmm. I'll avoid reducing this argument to absurd levels (reduction ad absurdum, or whatever the rhetoricists call it), and simply ask this: what examples are there of newsgroups with such low volumes and readerships that this has occurred ? I know of none. Certainly, there are low-volume newsgroups; soc.misc at times runs for long periods with no postings; then occasionally flares up into a raging debate. I've never seen a posting stating "I posted this to soc.misc, but didn't get a response, so I'm trying here", but, of course, I don't read the whole net. There may be examples in the more obscure comp* groups, which I don't read. My hunch is that many people do what I do; subscribe to lots of low-volume groups, even if my interest is marginal. It's not much work to "n" the odd posting once a week, and occasionally it's something I want to respond to. If you have examples, I'll accept your reasoning, of course. >Think of a moribund newsgroup as USENET's appendix. I have no complaint about removing groups; I just have a higher tolerance than you for how "active" a group should be. ------------------------------ 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 --------------------------------