Aihps3.196 net.news.group utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!houxi!ihnss!ihps3!pcl Thu Apr 15 09:37:09 1982 Re: new groups This is in response to Greg Guthrie's (ihuxp!grg) article on "new groups" which was recently (mis-) posted to 'net.unix' (a non-existent news group). There are several reasons one should not post articles to non-existent newsgroups, and that the formation of new newsgroups be preceeded by some (limited) amount of discussion. As I see it, violating these standards: - Wastes disk space and i-nodes, through having unused directories. While Greg points out that these directories can be removed, having to do so is an administrative expense that I regard as a waste of (my) time. - Diminishes the utility of Usenet. The whole point of having news categorized into newsgroups is to provide enough structure for people to be able to select what they want to see. The news group structure and the process for creating new newsgroups are not arbitrary conventions left over from ancient history - they reflect the group's consensus of the best means to provide this structure that we (the Usenet community) have been able to come up with! - Undermines attempts at documentation. (This is really another facet of the previous point.) Some of us (but apparently not enough) try to maintain an up-to-date, annotated list of newsgroups for all of the users on our machine. Use of newsgroups with no clear charter, that are indistinguishable in purpose from existing newsgroups, and/or that are never generally announced make this effort nearly impossible. I should note here that if more sites maintained an accurate 'ngfile' (WITHOUT 'all' in it), novice users would be held to existing, agreed upon newsgroups. I have found it much less of a hassle to update our 'ngfile' as needed than to remove spurious newsgroups. Paul Lustgarten Usenet administrator for ihps3 Bell Labs - Indian Hill ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.