official policy on creation of new newsgroups

[cbosgd!mark]

The current official policy on creation new newsgroups is that someone is
supposed to propose it in net.general,net.news.group (substitute whatever
for net if it's a local group, or set up your own procedure) and all
followups are supposed to go to net.news.group only. (The followup
command in all recent versions of news does this automatically.) Once
a consensus is reached, the person who originally proposed it should
make a yes/no decision on the newsgroup and a name, announce it to
net.general, and create it. (If he is not the netnews contact at his
site, he should ask that person to create it, or ask me.)

Modern versions of the software do not let people create new groups
unless they are the local netnews contact, or the super user. There
are many old versions still in use out there that don't enforce this,
which shows that no matter what change we make, getting software to
enforce it in the finite future is very hard.

The net.sctv business has recreated the suggestion of a netnews
committee who makes all the decisions. It has not been resolved yet.
The last time somebody suggested this, there was overwhelming sentiment
to not restrict new newsgroups, but rather to make the software wonderful,
by such things as automatically expiring empty newsgroups, and making it
much faster to do readnews or checknews. (This will probably happen in
version 3.0, which is right now in the wishful thinking stage due to
lack of time on the part of the authors.)

As to natural language, the flaming has gone on for a while but the person
who proposed it hasn't made a decision. Personally, I don't understand
what you guys are going to talk about, but there is lots of stuff I don't
subscribe to. So I'll make a decision: net.nlang is now created with no
subgroups. Post to it and mention the particular language in your title.
Any language that picks up significant activity that continues after the
novelty wears off (the participants should decide this) should create its
own subgroup. New natural language newsgroups can be started in the parent
newsgroup. (Off the wall thought - once the 14 char limit goes away
in the eventual version 3.0, you might want to call it "net.tongues".)

Mark

[watmath!bstempleton]

I would just like to make one comment about the creation of groups. People
seem to be of the opinion that the net should be used for every discussion
that goes on! If I created a newsgroup for every group of people I hold
discussions with locally here, the list would get very long.

I have seen people put out a message saying 'anybody interested in net.blat',
get back 3 mail messages and say 'I guess there are people interested, time
to create net.blat'. CRAP!
Right now the net has many many sites, and if you create a net.group, you
send these messages that 4 people want to each and every one of them.
The net is more economical of resources when a large discussion is taking
place, but not at all whent the discussion is small. When you get ten people
or less interested in the discussion, talk by mail! If you can, have the
most central person set up an alias somewhere, but this is not needed, because
the number of you will be small enough that you can all keep personal mailing
lists.

Once more people join the group, then say 'I already have a large number of
people fervently discussing the Bob and Doug show. Let's have a group'

People who are holding these groups should simply send messages with long
expiry dates to some group like net.news.group (or perhaps a special one)
describing the discussion and how to get in on it.

Brad