Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Newsgroup guidelines etc
Message-ID: <28625@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 8 Apr 89 16:20:03 GMT
References: <11241@well.UUCP> <28488@apple.Apple.COM> <11269@well.UUCP>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 63

>Unfortunately it's as easy to rmgroup something or un-moderate it (two
>actions with real potential to annoy the net) as it is to create a new
>group (which I would argue is far less annoying and a Good Thing
>overall).

No, it's not. Rmgroup messages are trapped by code in USENET (unless
specifically turned off at compile time). A rmgroup doesn't happen -- it
sends mail to the admin telling him to go and rmgroup it. And the reality
is, many of them don't bother. There are still sites here in the bay area
that have ba.wobegon around, which was an offshoot of a little disagreement
Gordon Moffett and I had four or five years ago. 

The reality is, you create a group, it gets created. You send out a rmgroup,
maybe it gets deleted, maybe it doesn't -- and then you end up with a bunch
of disconnected pockets of sites where people are posting into a group that
doesn't exist and wondering why nobody is answering. That creates a rather
nasty form of confusion, especially for the naive user -- they think they're
dealing with a 'real' gropu and 'getting out' when they really aren't. Not a
good thing at all. 

This is the only real reason why I'm against newsgroup creation on demand
these days -- because a group, once created, basically exists forever no
matter how many rmgroups go out. The concept of a tem.all is nice in theory,
but the mechanics of the net keep it from working right.

This is, by the way, about the fourth or fifth time I've seen this
discussion come up -- once pre-Cabal, twice in the Cabal, and now. After
looking at it closely each time, it's always been found to be nice but
unworkable. Sigh.

Moderated groups are another issue, but there are problems there, too. I
found out, much to my dismay, that it's impossible to cleanly turn a
moderated gropu unmoderated -- too many sites either never see the control
messages or ignore them. When we turned comp.text.desktop unmoderated, I
spent a couple of weeks getting literally *hundreds* of copies of each
posted message mailed to me by nice sites that thought comp.text.desktop was
still moderated. I finally have to start dumping things wholesale to
/dev/null just to keep from filling up disks... Here's a case wehre the
mechanism *does* exist, but it's unreliable enough that it might as well not
be there. (Sort of like message cancellation, another existing mechanism
that never quite seems to work right).

>This is already true today, but conventions of good behavior prevent
>anarchy.  Chuq suggests that if we adopted a "newgroup at will"
>philosophy, the rest of the alt.* shennanigans would ensue
>automatically.  I am not sure if I agree completely here -- surely some
>of the rmgroup war mindset is due to the "playpen" aura alt.* seems to
>cultivate?

The reason I say that is this: the same people playing with alt.* are here
on USENET. If you adopt alt.*'s format on the rest of USENET, with the same
people who are fooling around with it over  there over here, how can you not
believe that they'll jjust bring their games over here as well? I'd be
surprised as all get out if it didn't happen.


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.