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From: dlm@cuuxb.ATT.COM (Dennis L. Mumaugh)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Proposed OFFICIAL Newsgroup Creation/Deletion Guidelines
Message-ID: <2656@cuuxb.ATT.COM>
Date: 28 Mar 89 20:19:47 GMT
References: <1634@ncar.ucar.edu> <3726@phri.UUCP> <8280@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: dlm@cuuxb.UUCP (Dennis L. Mumaugh)
Followup-To: news.groups
Organization: ATT Data Systems Group, Lisle, Ill.
Lines: 57

In article <8280@csli.STANFORD.EDU> cphoenix@csli.stanford.edu
(Chris Phoenix) writes:

       ... and I don't care about most of the stuff posted, so
      why should the size of the net affect whether or not a
      group gets created?  A group now is the same as a group
      several years ago, no?  If a group with 100 members was
      worthwhile back then, why should it change now?

If you read the arbitron reports and the estimate of the cost of
posting an article, you will see that there needs to be a line
drawn.  Each article takes a small amount of money for each site.
Cost of phone calls, ammortized cost of equipment, etc.  Also
each article posted means the use of some resource -- a disk
block, an inode, some cpu cyles, some modem bauds -- that could
have been used for a better purpose.

      As more people start reading the net, the percentage of
      readers required to form a group will get smaller, and so
      there will be more groups.  On the other hand, this hasn't
      killed us yet.  If groups are required to have more
      readers, then they will have a higher volume, and some
      topics will be squeezed together.  From what I've seen,
      high volume is much more of a problem for users than
      fragmented topics. (I've been forced to drop several groups
      already.)

Information overload is the problem.  We have no such problem in
a sense as the amount of disk storage in the universe has a
limit.  In a practical sense, I have 128,000 blocks for netnews.
But in reality if the volume goes up the residence time of an
article goes down.  Too short a residence time results in news
discussions becoming volatile as people fail to realize that the
exact same point was raised only ### days earlier.

      So the choice is between letting the net have more groups
      (annoyance for the administrators) and forcing the groups
      to gain more readers and posters (major problems for the
      users).  IMHO, the users are more important. 1/2 :-)

I made a coment earlier (six months ago) without any
reaction on the net:  USENET is NOT a substitute for the Dow
Jones Ticker, the AP news wire and an up load of the typesetter
tapes of all textbooks and magazines, etc.  It cannot duiplicate
the library.  As such one should not have the completeness
obsession: the namespace expands to include all possible
subjects.

The original plans for creation of a news group was that one was
created ONLY after traffic proved it was viable.  Newgroups
served to manage existing traffic not generate new traffic.  I
still think we need to operate that way, otherwise everntually we
will have a news group for every subject in the library and
change from names to a Dewey Decimal system.
-- 
=Dennis L. Mumaugh
 Lisle, IL  ...!{att,lll-crg,attunix}!cuuxb!dlm  OR dlm@cuuxb.att.com