Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!aplcen!haven!uvaarpa!murdoch!astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl8f
From: gl8f@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ST-Report / CPU-Report on Usenet?
Keywords: st-report
Message-ID: <1990Mar14.030926.3626@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 14 Mar 90 03:09:26 GMT
References: <1567@bdt.UUCP> <11352@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> <3070@water.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Reply-To: gl8f@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 31

In article <3070@water.waterloo.edu> ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (L.J.Dickey) writes:
>In article <11352@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) writes:
>>100-140K of text per issue, huh? It'd be best to break something like that
>>into a few smaller articles. Maybe even a good idea to put stuff like that
>>in its own newsgroup. 
>
>I support the idea of a separate news group.
>This one is "comp.sys.atari.st".  How about "comp.sys.atari.st.mags".
>Or "comp.mag.atari.st".

I don't think this is appropriate for several reasons:

1) The mags, unedited, contain things which are inappropriate for the
comp.* hierarchy. They also contain duplicate material.

2) The existing mailing lists ought to be a good judge of the actual
readership -- and they aren't that big, around 250 readers each. The
load on the Internet is much lower for this size list than a real
comp.* newsgroup. (Despite the fact that only 100 relative votes are
needed to form a group, actual readership for most groups with a few
hundred votes is in the several thousands. I'm not so sure a new
newsgroup would even pass.)

Remember, I started these mailing lists last time the issue came up of
distributing these mags via newsgroup. Although I have occasionally
let the mags lag as far as 2 or 3 weeks behind real-time, I think I've
provided a better solution than a newgroup, given the volume that we
have.

Greg Lindahl
gl8f@virginia.edu                                  Astrophysicists for Choice.