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From: richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Proposed OFFICIAL Newsgroup Creation/Deletion Guidelines
Message-ID: <13827@gryphon.COM>
Date: 27 Mar 89 20:34:04 GMT
Reply-To: richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton)
Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, CA
Lines: 28

In article <27870@apple.Apple.COM> chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
>
>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:

This is the goal of the net ? To not confuse the naive user ?

>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. 

The net has a way of educating users.
-- 
                  Keep out of the reach of children
richard@gryphon.COM  decwrl!gryphon!richard   gryphon!richard@elroy.jpl.NASA.GOV