Procedure for group removal?
Yowie
actual Quakers posting there, and the vast majority of material posted
in SRQ is both off-topic and gives an extremely negative image of what
Quakerism is about.
Since it seems highly unlikely that SRQ could be brought back to a forum
where Quakerism could reasonably be discussed, it has been suggested by
some (I being one) that in the interests of Quakerism and indeed
maintaining the 'quality' of Big 8 newsgroups, SRQ ought to be deleted.
Is it possible to remove a group by vote?
Yowie
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
Yes and no and probably not.
Yes: Group removal is done by a vote among the members of the
Big-8 Management Board:
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php
No: There is no method for "members" of a group to "vote" for
its removal--not in general and most definitely not in this
particular case. The "members" of the group are an indefinite
set of all who use the group. Those who use the group
to give what you call a false image of Quakerism may, in fact
be Quakers of a different theology or spirituality. Those
who use the group to abuse Quakers simply because they hate
all kinds of Quakers are "members" of the group.
Probably not: Will the board read the traffic in the newsgroup,
make a judgment on whether it correctly represents Quakerism,
and then vote to decide whether the group should continue to
exist in the big-8? I can only speak for myself as a member
of the board, but my best guess is that the board will not
vote to remove the group on these grounds.
If you want the group to correctly represent Quakerism, you'll
have to post correct representations of Quakerism in the group.
Marty
--
Co-chair of the Big-8 Management Board (B8MB) <http://www.big-8.org>
Unless otherwise indicated, I speak for myself, not for the Board.
Steve Bonine
> The group soc.religion.quaker looks quite active, but there are no
> actual Quakers posting there, and the vast majority of material posted
> in SRQ is both off-topic and gives an extremely negative image of what
> Quakerism is about.
All the newsgroups in the soc.religion hierarchy are moderated except
soc.religion.quaker and soc.religion.satanism.
The vote for this group was held in 1992 and was 137:34. It was
proposed from the beginning as unmoderated, perhaps as a reflection of
the beliefs of the persons proposing the newsgroup.
> Since it seems highly unlikely that SRQ could be brought back to a forum
> where Quakerism could reasonably be discussed, it has been suggested by
> some (I being one) that in the interests of Quakerism and indeed
> maintaining the 'quality' of Big 8 newsgroups, SRQ ought to be deleted.
If you're really interested in a place in Usenet where the topic can be
reasonably discussed, I'd suggest proposing a moderated newsgroup.
There's a reason why newsgroups in the soc.religion hierarchy are
moderated. (Don't suggest that the current group be moderated in place;
that discussion has been held many times and there are good reasons why
that isn't going to happen.)
> Is it possible to remove a group by vote?
If the board voted to remove the newsgroup, that would remove it from
the official list of newsgroups and from servers that process newsgroup
removal requests issued by the board. Your issue is that the newsgroup
provides a negative view of the religion, and that issue would remain
after such action by the board. The now-unofficial newsgroup would
remain on many servers.
Paul W. Schleck
Hash: SHA1
>Yowie
Here's some suggestions that I made when this same dilemma was brought
up by you on soc.religion.quaker back in April of 2008:
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.religion.quaker/msg/9e3dc830e88cb41d
Then, as now, you may be facing the only practical present solution of
making a new moderated newsgroup (soc.religion.quaker.moderated).
However, there seems to be opportunities and solutions available to keep
moderation consistent with Quaker values. For example, what techniques
are used to organize Quakers, Quaker activities, and Quaker meetings to
keep them from descending into aimlessness, apathy, and noise, or even
just protect them from outright malicious destruction from insincere or
bad-faith individuals trying to undermine the movement internally?
Consensus? Discernment? Outreach? Setting an example for others to
follow? Shaming/Ostracization? Could they be repurposed towards
creating a worthwhile moderated newsgroup consistent with Quaker values?
- --
Paul W. Schleck
psch...@novia.net
http://www.novia.net/~pschleck/
Finger psch...@novia.net for PGP Public Key
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Yowie
All of those techniques you mentioned work and work well when there are
enough people working together to carry them out.
My contention is that there is not enough people on SRQ who are
interested in discussing Quakerism (there no members or attenders of
Quaker meetings left) to even carry out that sort of thing. Thus the
group has been taken over by people who are not at all interested in any
aspect of Quakerism (they admit it themselves) and crosspostings from
other groups.
Creating a moderated group to sit along side SRQ would produce an empty
group.
As far as I can see, there is a group that is not meeting its charter,
and serving no useful purpose. It has effectively been 'abandoned' and I
thought that 'abandoned' groups were removed.
Yowie
Yowie
> On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 23:12:18 +1000, Yowie<Yowie9644....@yahoo.com.au> wrote in<86scds...@mid.individual.net>:
>
>> The group soc.religion.quaker looks quite active, but there are no
>> actual Quakers posting there, and the vast majority of material posted
>> in SRQ is both off-topic and gives an extremely negative image of what
>> Quakerism is about.
>
>> Since it seems highly unlikely that SRQ could be brought back to a forum
>> where Quakerism could reasonably be discussed, it has been suggested by
>> some (I being one) that in the interests of Quakerism and indeed
>> maintaining the 'quality' of Big 8 newsgroups, SRQ ought to be deleted.
>
>> Is it possible to remove a group by vote?
>
> Yes and no and probably not.
>
> Yes: Group removal is done by a vote among the members of the
> Big-8 Management Board:
>
> http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php
>
> No: There is no method for "members" of a group to "vote" for
> its removal--not in general and most definitely not in this
> particular case. The "members" of the group are an indefinite
> set of all who use the group. Those who use the group
> to give what you call a false image of Quakerism may, in fact
> be Quakers of a different theology or spirituality. Those
> who use the group to abuse Quakers simply because they hate
> all kinds of Quakers are "members" of the group.
There's no discussion of Quakerism, for or against, or even inter-sect
discussion.
> Probably not: Will the board read the traffic in the newsgroup,
> make a judgment on whether it correctly represents Quakerism,
> and then vote to decide whether the group should continue to
> exist in the big-8? I can only speak for myself as a member
> of the board, but my best guess is that the board will not
> vote to remove the group on these grounds.
What if the group has no or very little on-topic posts (maybe 1 post a
month if we're lucky) in a plethora (about 900 posts) of off-topic material?
> If you want the group to correctly represent Quakerism, you'll
> have to post correct representations of Quakerism in the group.
There are no Quakers left to do that representation. I am not a Quaker,
merely someone who is 'a bit interested' in it. The actual Quakers left
quite some time ago.
Yowie
Yowie
> Yowie wrote:
>> The group soc.religion.quaker looks quite active, but there are no
>> actual Quakers posting there, and the vast majority of material posted
>> in SRQ is both off-topic and gives an extremely negative image of what
>> Quakerism is about.
>
> All the newsgroups in the soc.religion hierarchy are moderated except
> soc.religion.quaker and soc.religion.satanism.
>
> The vote for this group was held in 1992 and was 137:34. It was proposed
> from the beginning as unmoderated, perhaps as a reflection of the
> beliefs of the persons proposing the newsgroup.
>
>> Since it seems highly unlikely that SRQ could be brought back to a forum
>> where Quakerism could reasonably be discussed, it has been suggested by
>> some (I being one) that in the interests of Quakerism and indeed
>> maintaining the 'quality' of Big 8 newsgroups, SRQ ought to be deleted.
>
> If you're really interested in a place in Usenet where the topic can be
> reasonably discussed, I'd suggest proposing a moderated newsgroup.
> There's a reason why newsgroups in the soc.religion hierarchy are
> moderated. (Don't suggest that the current group be moderated in place;
> that discussion has been held many times and there are good reasons why
> that isn't going to happen.)
There seems little point creating a moderated group because a moderated
group is a method of decreasing the noise, it does not increase the
signal. SRQ would be lucky to have 1 on-topic post per month.
>> Is it possible to remove a group by vote?
>
> If the board voted to remove the newsgroup, that would remove it from
> the official list of newsgroups and from servers that process newsgroup
> removal requests issued by the board. Your issue is that the newsgroup
> provides a negative view of the religion, and that issue would remain
> after such action by the board. The now-unofficial newsgroup would
> remain on many servers.
The issue, to my mind, is that there is a group that has no or virtually
no content that meets its charter. There is little or no signal even if
all the noise (and there's *lots* of noise) is filtered out.
My understanding was that Big-8 management would remove such groups from
the official list.
Yowie
Seebs
> There seems little point creating a moderated group because a moderated
> group is a method of decreasing the noise, it does not increase the
> signal. SRQ would be lucky to have 1 on-topic post per month.
I disagree. If we had a group consisting only of the posts here that
are neither crossposts nor spam about crunchy's mental health, it would
have a few topical posts -- and I suspect a few people would come back.
But either way, honestly, I think the time has come. The group is dead.
It's not going to come back. It's completely dominated by people who post
egregious amounts of random noise, and crunchy is actually distinguished
here by the fact that he sometimes makes posts which contain some kind
of reference to words that were in a post by someone else.
-s
--
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
Sir David
> The issue, to my mind, is that there is a group that has no or virtually
> no content that meets its charter.
Yet, only minutes later, you posted to a thread
on the subject of Quaker practice. Posts dealing
with the subject of Quakerism aren't hard to find,
unless you're specifically avoiding them to try to
prove they they are lacking.
Off-charter post and threads do seem to outnumber
the ones the "meet[] the charter," but there are
clearly a variety of opinions about what's about
Quakerism and what's not.
> There is little or no signal even if
> all the noise (and there's *lots* of noise) is filtered out.
Try searching for your own posts, and see if you
can still make that claim with a straight face. You
and others use this group to discuss Quaker belief
and practice, although it's a minority of the content.
Yet you want to destroy the group, because you don't
like the content. If you don't like it, of course you are
free to leave, but wanting to destroy it so no others
can use it seems ... unquakerly.
> My understanding was that Big-8 management would remove such groups from
> the official list.
Your understanding is flawed. There is no "Big 8
management" that has any authority over newsserver
operations. Newsmasters are free to ignore any and
all rmgroup messages, and there is a widespread
philosophy that any properly configured and managed
newsserver must ignore all rmgroup messages in the
big 8. I'm pretty sure Google Groups ignores such
messages, although I would not consider it a properly
managed newsserver. As an aside, I would not place
any credibility on its bug-laden statistical programs.
A newsserver that can't properly understand threading
is hardly a reliable source. Google stats are more
"for entertainement purposes" than anything else, as
you have seen.
A rmgroup message could be sent out, if you could
somehow convince "the board" that a small number
of people who discuss Quakerism should be allowed
to delete a group because they don't like the content
of other posters. History would indicate that such
a campaign would not be convincing, but if you like
tilting at windmills, have at it. But then, the rmgroup
would be resoundingly ignored by the vast majority of
newsservers, and would thus be utterly ineffective.
The windmills will remain.
If you don't like the group, you can leave. But it's
not your newsgroup to destroy, even if that were possible.
The fact that the handful of posters calling for its
destruction use it regularly to discuss Quakerism would
surely be noted by the board, who are unlikley to be
convinced. They probably wouldn't care. Much like most
Quakers. Carl tried to get Quakers to take an interest,
and he failed.
So in this universe, the real one, SRQ remains, and
remaining options include leaving, continuing to use
it as you and other are currently doing, and trying
to improve it. And there are other options. Destroying
the newgroup is not a viable option, and you have no
right to destroy it, or to pretend that nobody's using
it on-charter when you yourself do so with such frequency.
Adam H. Kerman
Here's a great thought. How about unsubscribing so you never see any of the
discussion that you don't approve of? Unmoderated newsgroups aren't removed
for reasons of topic censorship.
Alexander Bartolich
Yowie wrote:
> [...]
> The issue, to my mind, is that there is a group that has no or virtually
> no content that meets its charter. There is little or no signal even if
> all the noise (and there's *lots* of noise) is filtered out.
>
> My understanding was that Big-8 management would remove such groups from
> the official list.
Actually, the B8MB has no policy in place to handle cases like this.
We don't have the expertise to evaluate all groups in the hierarchy.
Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
> The issue, to my mind, is that there is a group that has no or virtually
> no content that meets its charter. There is little or no signal even if
> all the noise (and there's *lots* of noise) is filtered out.
That's based on your definition of "charter", "signal", and "noise".
> My understanding was that Big-8 management would remove such groups from
> the official list.
The board (and predecessors to the board) have clearly stated on many
occasions that is not part of their charter to rule on whether given
submissions to unmoderated newsgroups are appropriate.
It's an unmoderated newsgroup. If you don't like what you see there,
move on. Your attempts to teach the pig to sing are just annoying the pig.
Ian Davis
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the RSofF.
Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group, following a
vote have the power to terminate it, or any special privileged position,
regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its membership in the title.
Ian
Adam H. Kerman
>soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the RSofF.
>Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group, following a
>vote have the power to terminate it, or any special privileged position,
>regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its membership in the title.
Are you all going to ask another 12 times hoping for other answers?
It's an unmoderated newsgroup. No one has special privileges with regard
to an unmoderated newsgroup. No one.
If you don't like what is posted there, unsubscribe. Or, here's a thought:
Post something that YOU would find to be of interest, something that
others might fight interesting. A thread starts!
On topic discussion on Usenet: It's so simple to make it happen.
You just post on topic!
Seebs
> If you don't like what is posted there, unsubscribe. Or, here's a thought:
> Post something that YOU would find to be of interest, something that
> others might fight interesting. A thread starts!
No, it doesn't.
Not when there are dozens to hundreds of off-topic posts a day, and perhaps
three or four people who would even consider participating.
At this point, it's dead. I don't really see any point in removing it,
but that group has become the permanent residence of three deeply insane
people and one or two more people who have nothing better to do than
bait them. It's over; there is no discussion, nor will there be, because
there's no one left to discuss, and there's no way for anyone who wants
to discuss to be heard over the noise.
Aratzio
"Adam H. Kerman" <a...@chinet.com> got double secret probation for
writing:
>Are you all going to ask another 12 times hoping for other answers?
How about 2 dozen?
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
privileged position, regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its
membership in the title.
soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the
RSofF. Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group,
following avote have the power to terminate it, or any special
Aratzio
<usenet...@seebs.net> got double secret probation for writing:
>No, it doesn't.
Yes, it does.
Adam H. Kerman
>>If you don't like what is posted there, unsubscribe. Or, here's a thought:
>>Post something that YOU would find to be of interest, something that
>>others might fight interesting. A thread starts!
>No, it doesn't.
>Not when there are dozens to hundreds of off-topic posts a day, and perhaps
>three or four people who would even consider participating.
Congratulations! You and your friends ruined the group yourselves by
refusing to post what you consider to be on topic. Good job.
Only a newsgroup's regulars can choose to ruin a newsgroup. This is a
famous Usenet quote, something I've been saying for years. I think it's
my quote, but I really cannot remember.
>At this point, it's dead. I don't really see any point in removing it,
>but that group has become the permanent residence of three deeply insane
>people and one or two more people who have nothing better to do than
>bait them. It's over; there is no discussion, nor will there be, because
>there's no one left to discuss, and there's no way for anyone who wants
>to discuss to be heard over the noise.
Well, you're the murderer. And the group will stay dead as long as you
refuse to try.
Again, congratulations! Another fine job.
Seebs
> Yes, it does.
I provided an argument. You didn't. This is because my position is supported
by empirical data and reasoning, and yours is not.
Congratulations, you've demonstrated a complete inability to comprehend
written text or advance an argument. *plonk*
Seebs
> Congratulations! You and your friends ruined the group yourselves by
> refusing to post what you consider to be on topic. Good job.
Not so.
1. I wasn't even around during most of the time in question.
2. A number of us tried posting things on topic. There were not enough
of us to sustain any kind of discussion.
Would a group pass a vote for creation if there were six people willing
to vote for it or express interest in it? No, because that's not enough
people to justify a newsgroup. Because six people isn't enough to produce
a working discussion.
> Only a newsgroup's regulars can choose to ruin a newsgroup.
I agree.
The regulars of SRQ are crunchy (he changes posting names every few months),
Jon, and Hendry. Who post dozens upon dozens of articles a day. Other
people tried to have conversations, but enough gave up due to the noise
that there simply aren't enough people left to justify it.
> Well, you're the murderer.
Yes, because I am totally responsible for things that happened during years
when I didn't even have Usenet access.
> And the group will stay dead as long as you refuse to try.
Except I *did* try. For months. I posted, I talked to people... and there
simply aren't enough people.
I love how you jump in with a bunch of speculative nonsense which is not only
wrong, but wrong in every conceivable particular. You blame me for things
which largely happened while I wasn't even on Usenet, and then for not trying
things that I tried for months, all the while ignoring the key fact that
there simply aren't enough lucid regulars to make a functional group. We
tried. We posted stuff, we responded to each other... but when you have
maybe six people willing to post anything on topic in a given week, that's
not enough people to produce sufficient traffic to keep a group functional,
least of all when they are outnumbered by people who are posting dozens
upon dozens of off-topic posts, and more people who are responding to them
at great length.
Engineer
THE STANDARD ADVICE:
There is a way to influence what gets discussed in a
newsgroup that works well, and another way that has
never worked no matter how many people have tried it.
What works: Post articles on the topic you wish to
see discussed and participate in the resulting
discussion. Use killfiles and filters so that you
don't see the articles that you dislike. If you don't
know how to use a killfile, use good old fashioned
discipline and don't read posts by people who post
articles that you dislike. Never, ever respond to
articles that you dislike.
What doesn't work: Respond to articles that you
dislike, complain about articles that you dislike,
complain about posters that you dislike, complain
about how terrible everyone else is for not posting
what you want them to post. Talk about how to respond
to articles that you dislike. Make the articles that
you dislike the center of attention, the main topic
of discussion, and a personal crusade. -Guy Macon
Adam H. Kerman
>>Congratulations! You and your friends ruined the group yourselves by
>>refusing to post what you consider to be on topic. Good job.
>Not so.
>1. I wasn't even around during most of the time in question.
>2. A number of us tried posting things on topic. There were not enough
>of us to sustain any kind of discussion.
In lieu of arguing with me, post something on topic. Look for Quaker
discussion elsewhere on Usenet. That's your audience for the group.
>Would a group pass a vote for creation if there were six people willing
>to vote for it or express interest in it? No, because that's not enough
>people to justify a newsgroup. Because six people isn't enough to produce
>a working discussion.
Speculation about group creation is irrelevant given that the group exists.
>>Only a newsgroup's regulars can choose to ruin a newsgroup.
>I agree.
Then do something to improve the situation.
>The regulars of SRQ are crunchy (he changes posting names every few months),
>Jon, and Hendry. Who post dozens upon dozens of articles a day. Other
>people tried to have conversations, but enough gave up due to the noise
>that there simply aren't enough people left to justify it.
Then those posting off topic sound like they would be easy to ignore, so
stop blaming "noise" for lack of discussion.
Because "noise" is NOT responsible for lack of discussion of issues
related to Quakers.
>>And the group will stay dead as long as you refuse to try.
>Except I *did* try. For months. I posted, I talked to people... and there
>simply aren't enough people.
Fine.
>I love how you jump in with a bunch of speculative nonsense which is not only
>wrong, but wrong in every conceivable particular.
No, dude, I've just heard it all before, many many times. There's nothing
unique about your situation. Nothing.
>You blame me for things which largely happened while I wasn't even on
>Usenet, and then for not trying things that I tried for months, all the
>while ignoring the key fact that there simply aren't enough lucid regulars
>to make a functional group.
Not YOU specifically, but current and former Usenet users with an interest
in Quaker issues who just don't want to use the group.
>We tried. We posted stuff, we responded to each other... but when you
>have maybe six people willing to post anything on topic in a given week,
>that's not enough people to produce sufficient traffic to keep a group
>functional, least of all when they are outnumbered by people who are
>posting dozens upon dozens of off-topic posts, and more people who are
>responding to them at great length.
Actually, there are numerous newsgroups that have that few regulars.
You just have to accept that it'll be a low volume newsgroup. And you're
still blaming off-topic posts.
Nothing I've said makes any difference. I have no interest in the topic,
so getting discussion going isn't up to me. I can offer only the usual advice.
(<<Kelly>>)
As seems to be the Quakerly way of saying "I agree", let me now say,
"you speak my mind".
In spades, actually. ;-)
(<<Kelly>>)
This is an interesting post on two levels. (1) Engineer doesn't
practice what he preaches here. If he did, he wouldn't have left in a
huff over a year ago (or maybe it's been longer than that) only to
return incognito as a (at least one) sockpuppet. (2) Engineer, who
insisted he never be called in here by his IRL name, has just signed
the above with his IRL name.
Tell me - is there a Quaker or former Quaker in here who *isn't* a
wishy-washy hypocrite?
Aratzio
<usenet...@seebs.net> got double secret probation for writing:
>On 2010-06-05, Aratzio <a6ah...@sneakemail.com> wrote:
>> On 05 Jun 2010 05:49:26 GMT, in the land of news.groups, Seebs
>><usenet...@seebs.net> got double secret probation for writing:
>>>No, it doesn't.
>
>> Yes, it does.
>
>I provided an argument.
No, you didn't
Bruce Esquibel
> On 2010-06-05, Adam H. Kerman <a...@chinet.com> wrote:
>> If you don't like what is posted there, unsubscribe. Or, here's a thought:
>> Post something that YOU would find to be of interest, something that
>> others might fight interesting. A thread starts!
> No, it doesn't.
> Not when there are dozens to hundreds of off-topic posts a day, and perhaps
> three or four people who would even consider participating.
Yes it does.
Look at groups like alt.autos.toyota, the majority of messages in there are
off topic and in the same volume, dozens to hundreds a day.
But if you look for a thread actually dealing with Toyota, it's participated
in like any normal thread in a news group.
Problems like this are best handled by filtering in your newsreader, not
removal of the group. If there is a purpose, people will find it and figure
out what to do to tune out the others.
-bruce
b...@ripco.com
Seebs
> Look at groups like alt.autos.toyota, the majority of messages in there are
> off topic and in the same volume, dozens to hundreds a day.
> But if you look for a thread actually dealing with Toyota, it's participated
> in like any normal thread in a news group.
Do they have at most six or seven people left who are interested in discussing
their topic? I do not in the least dispute that a sufficiently large crowd
of people can maintain a functional conversation even if there's a lot of
noise.
You can have a working newsgroup if:
1. You have only a few participants, but there's very little spam and
off-topic noise.
2. You have a large number of active participants, who have a working way
of bypassing or ignoring the noise.
You can't do it with very few participants and a great deal of noise,
because you can't create enough topical content to attract new participants.
> Problems like this are best handled by filtering in your newsreader, not
> removal of the group. If there is a purpose, people will find it and figure
> out what to do to tune out the others.
Well, that's sort of the point. There isn't a purpose anymore; it's long
since gotten to the same state you would expect if you created a group because
a dozen or so people said they thought they might be interested in posting in
it, and half of them never even subscribed after it was created.
Aratzio
Bruce Esquibel <b...@ripco.com> got double secret probation for
writing:
>Look at groups like alt.autos.toyota, the majority of messages in there are
>off topic and in the same volume, dozens to hundreds a day.
>
Wingnut paranoid politics always drags a newsgroup into the toilet.
Aratzio
dr_jeff <u...@msu.edu> got double secret probation for writing:
>There is a procedure to remove a newsgroup. However, the procedure won't
>work for this newsgroup.
>
>PS, thanks for cross posting.
>
>Jeff
That is me, Usenet's most helpful Netizen. Bringing happiness and joy
where ever I travel.
Gregory Hall, Esq.
news:749l06t3cackqtc9b...@4ax.com...
>
> That is me, Usenet's most homosexual netizen. Bringing happiness and joy
> to the gay community where ever I travel.
>
Take a hike, faggot!
--
Gregory Hall
The Greatest
" Gregory Hall, Esq." <greg...@home.fake> wrote in message news:3qauf9....@news.alt.net...
IAWTP !!
--
HJ
The Greatest
"Aratzio" <a6ah...@sneakemail.com> wrote in message news:5qqj061bi814fco6c...@4ax.com...
> King Rat
Nice "foam" there Ratzo !!
--
HJ
Sharx35
"Aratzio" <a6ah...@sneakemail.com> wrote in message
news:749l06t3cackqtc9b...@4ax.com...
Make us REALLY happy by FOAD, eh?
>
The Greatest
"Sharx35" <sha...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:JvEOn.5866$Z6.5856@edtnps82...
> Sharx35
IAWTP !!
--
HJ
Sharx35
Sometimes I think my head will explode!!!!
Hachiroku ハチロク
Just gotta make your presence known, eh?
Adam H. Kerman
>>THE STANDARD ADVICE:
No, Guy Macon is a well known Usenet user. It's just a quote.
Aratzio
Hachiroku ???? <Tru...@e86.GTS> got double secret probation for
writing:
>On Sat, 05 Jun 2010 12:26:56 -0700, Aratzio wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 05 Jun 2010 15:11:14 -0400, in the land of alt.autos.toyota,
>> dr_jeff <u...@msu.edu> got double secret probation for writing:
>>
>>>Aratzio wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 5 Jun 2010 17:13:22 +0000 (UTC), in the land of news.groups,
>>>> Bruce Esquibel <b...@ripco.com> got double secret probation for writing:
>>>>
>>>>> Look at groups like alt.autos.toyota, the majority of messages in
>>>>> there are off topic and in the same volume, dozens to hundreds a day.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Wingnut paranoid politics always drags a newsgroup into the toilet.
>>>
>>>There is a procedure to remove a newsgroup. However, the procedure won't
>>>work for this newsgroup.
>>>
>>>PS, thanks for cross posting.
>>>
>>>Jeff
>>
>> That is me, Usenet's most helpful Netizen. Bringing happiness and joy
>> where ever I travel.
>
>Just gotta make your presence known, eh?
>
>
Well, duh.
How would I be helpful if my presence was unknown.
Simple thoughts are too difficult for the wingnuts.
Hachiroku ハチロク
Oh. *that's* what you call it.
Aratzio
It only took you twice to catch on, you are improving!
>
>>
>> Simple thoughts are too difficult for the wingnuts.
*DING*
Doug Freyburger
>
> The group soc.religion.quaker looks quite active, but there are no
> actual Quakers posting there,
I subscribed to the group and scanned through over 300 posts. It has
folks claiming to be Quaker. You may disagree with their claims but
that could as easily show your own bias against their stances as it
could be an authoritative conclusion.
> and the vast majority of material posted
> in SRQ is both off-topic and gives an extremely negative image of what
> Quakerism is about.
UseNet is a gigantic experiment in free speech. Among other lessons it
has shown that when free speech approaches completely unlimited that
attracts the worst abusers in the on-line world who proceed to take
advantage of a place where they can vent in a way that would never be
tolerated even in the most open of in-person locations.
Most of the groups under soc.religion.* are moderated to be able to keep
their traffic on topic. When SRQ was chartered the decision waqs made
to not mderate it and that exposed it to the abusers. Maybe it was
hoped that the reputation of Quakers in real life would not draw
abusers. It hardly matters, on UseNet anyone can eventually become a
target and only using kill files works. Yes, that does equal blaming
the victim but that's how unmoderated UseNet has worked ever since
commercial accounts were allowed. The days when trolling could get your
university UseNet access pulled went away with the 1980s.
> Since it seems highly unlikely that SRQ could be brought back to a forum
> where Quakerism could reasonably be discussed, it has been suggested by
> some (I being one) that in the interests of Quakerism and indeed
> maintaining the 'quality' of Big 8 newsgroups, SRQ ought to be deleted.>
> Is it possible to remove a group by vote?
This was already addressed by others. The board could vote to remove
the group from their list but that would not require any NSP to remove
it from their active file. Because it has active traffic it is my
opinion that few or no NSPs would follow any advisory control message by
the board to remove it (translates to a "no" even if there is a "yes").
Because it has traffic it is my opinion that even if there is a formal
RFD posted and discussed the board would vote no (if your crystal ball
is less cloudy than mine feel free to try, though).
Mark Kramer
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>Would a group pass a vote for creation if there were six people willing
>to vote for it or express interest in it? No, because that's not enough
>people to justify a newsgroup.
Groups pass creation votes today with ZERO people expressing an interest
in it. Six would be a veritable landslide of popular support.
>Because six people isn't enough to produce a working discussion.
Depends on how chatty they are.
Alexander Bartolich
> [...]
> This was already addressed by others. The board could vote to remove
> the group from their list but that would not require any NSP to remove
> it from their active file.
Of course.
> Because it has active traffic it is my opinion that few or no NSPs
> would follow any advisory control message by the board to remove it
> (translates to a "no" even if there is a "yes").
I think that you vastly overestimate the significance that NSPS give
control messages. Nobody (TM) actually reads them. With regards to
this issue, there are really only two policies:
- Either execute digitally signed control messages (semi-)automatically.
- Or don't execute any control message at all.
In any case the contents of control messages does not matter.
> Because it has traffic it is my opinion that even if there is a formal
> RFD posted and discussed the board would vote no (if your crystal ball
> is less cloudy than mine feel free to try, though).
A few thoughts:
- The problem of outright empty or crap flooded groups is really huge
- News.groups & company are already full of hate in idle state.
- Removing groups flooded by kooks will direct their attention to the
board.
- Since a lot of users have accounts with binary NSPs (who typically
don't care about checkgroups compliance and act only on explicit user.
requests) the value attached to group removal is rather low.
- The traditional strategy on contentious matters is to set up a
(simple) policy. Evaluating the quality of traffic, however, is
intrinsically a hard problem.
On the other hand the board will have to tackle this problem sooner or
later. If we give up all ambitions to be better than alt.* then we just
as well can close up shop.
Ciao
Alexander.
Kathy Morgan
> A few thoughts:
> - The problem of outright empty or crap flooded groups is really huge
> - News.groups & company are already full of hate in idle state.
> - Removing groups flooded by kooks will direct their attention to the
> board.
> - Since a lot of users have accounts with binary NSPs (who typically
> don't care about checkgroups compliance and act only on explicit user.
> requests) the value attached to group removal is rather low.
> - The traditional strategy on contentious matters is to set up a
> (simple) policy. Evaluating the quality of traffic, however, is
> intrinsically a hard problem.
>
> On the other hand the board will have to tackle this problem sooner or
> later. If we give up all ambitions to be better than alt.* then we just
> as well can close up shop.
Very well spoken.
There are a little over 2200 Big 8 newsgroups. Of those, many are dead
in the sense of being empty or nearly empty, with little or no traffic
of any kind. Some unknown number of the unmoderated groups are very
active but with little ontopic conversation.
When there is a lot of offtopic traffic in a group taken over by trolls
or mission posters, the group also tends to become an infectious source
of crossposting to other victim groups. I'd personally like to see
those groups removed; but as Alexander says, evaluating the quality of
traffic is a really hard problem. IMO the B8MB's time is better spent
first removing the empty groups and deferring consideration of groups
with large volumes of offtopic postings for some future time after the
empty groups have been removed.
--
Kathy, speaking only for myself
Mark Kramer
Alexander Bartolich <alexander...@gmx.at> wrote:
>I think that you vastly overestimate the significance that NSPS give
>control messages. Nobody (TM) actually reads them.
That's why they are called "control" messages and not "discussion".
>In any case the contents of control messages does not matter.
Ummmm, cancels are control messages. Are you saying that your official
position is that forged cancel messages are acceptable because the
"contents of control messages does not matter"?
>A few thoughts:
>- The problem of outright empty or crap flooded groups is really huge
The problem of empty groups is minimal. Empty unmoderated groups are
even less of a problem than empty moderated ones, since the former need
only a user to make them active again, and the latter require either a
user or a moderator or both.
>- News.groups & company are already full of hate in idle state.
There are plenty of fingers to point all around on that one.
>- Removing groups flooded by kooks will direct their attention to the
> board.
Hmmm.
>- The traditional strategy on contentious matters is to set up a
> (simple) policy.
Simple policies are not the board's specialty.
>On the other hand the board will have to tackle this problem sooner or
>later.
Why? When did the board get netcop authority over existing, active
groups? When did it WANT netcop authority?
Tom and Sandy
> soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the RSofF.
> Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group, following a
> vote have the power to terminate it, or any special privileged position,
> regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its membership in the title.
The RSofF is not an organization with a governing body to make
decisions or officers to carry them out. World-wide, there are perhaps
nearly 100 regional associations of local groups [often called Yearly
& Monthly meetings]. Most of these self-identify with 1 or 2 of the
branches of North American Quakerism which separated over issues of
faith and/or practice in the 19th & 20th centuries.
Having SRQ unmoderated was in part an attempt to insure that no one
branch could take control and exclude the others. The appearance of
control and bias by one faction has been an issue on several Quaker
blogs, nings, lists, etc. While it may be possible to create a charter
for a SRQ.mod that assures diversity, the energy and commitment
required may well feel out of proportion to the level of participation
that results. New groups moderated for the interests of one branch or
other sub-set of Quakers may be the way to go.
Tom
Yowie
> On Jun 4, 8:25 pm, ijda...@softbase.cs.uwaterloo.ca (Ian Davis) wrote:
>
>> soc.religion.quaker was originally created by individuals within the RSofF.
>> Does the RSofF as consequence of having created this group, following a
>> vote have the power to terminate it, or any special privileged position,
>> regarding a newsgroup that has the name of its membership in the title.
>
> The RSofF is not an organization with a governing body to make
> decisions or officers to carry them out. World-wide, there are perhaps
> nearly 100 regional associations of local groups [often called Yearly
> & Monthly meetings]. Most of these self-identify with 1 or 2 of the
> branches of North American Quakerism which separated over issues of
>
> Having SRQ unmoderated was in part an attempt to insure that no one
> branch could take control and exclude the others. The appearance of
> control and bias by one faction has been an issue on several Quaker
> blogs, nings, lists, etc. While it may be possible to create a charter
> for a SRQ.mod that assures diversity, the energy and commitment
> required may well feel out of proportion to the level of participation
> that results. New groups moderated for the interests of one branch or
> other sub-set of Quakers may be the way to go.
The reason why group deletion was explored was because there was so
little material relating to Quakerism (of any variety) due to the very
small number of 'active' posters (down to just 3 'regulars' now) and so
much off-topic and crossposted material that it was considered by the
few posters still there that had an interest in Quakerism (there were no
Quaker members or even atttenders left) that it would be better to 'lay
down' the group than to leave it to be yet another 'abandoned' group
collecting spam, kooks, kookbaiters and the crossposts such spam kooks
and kookbaiters attract.
Any group with a negligible amount of on-topic posts such that a
passer-by would be hard pressed to find one post, let along a meaningful
conversation, in amongst the kookery and crossposts serves no useful
purpose and just wastes bandwidth. Having such a group in the Big 8 also
reflects poorly on the Big 8, as well as the RSoF.
Quakers 'lay down' meetings where the meeting is no longer deemed
useful. It was thought, mistakenly, that 'laying down' SRQ could also be
an option. However, its been made abundantly clear that SRQ is not a
meeting but a Usenet group, and Usenet works differently to meatspace.
SRQ will not be deleted, no matter 'what', and even if it was, it would
not remove it from many news servers anyway, which would rather defeat
the purpose of the deletion.
So be it.
At least one other method of improving the signal:noise ratio deserves
an honest attempt before the last few leave. But if that doesn't work,
well, that just leaves another abandoned group in the Big 8 wasting
bandwidth and making a mockery of the subject it was intended to
discuss. I really do believe that there should be a method of group
deletion just as there is a method of group creation, but I am not 'in
charge'. SRQ will no doubt exist in some form on some newsservers long
after I've forgotten about it, and my hope is that at least some find it
'useful' in some way for as long as it remains.
Yowie
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
> ... I really do believe that there should be a method of group
>deletion just as there is a method of group creation ...
There is a method for deletion.
It is exactly on par with the method for creation.
The board sends "control messages" that, in fact,
don't control the behavior of anybody except those
who are willing to comply with the "control message."
> ... but I am not 'in charge'.
No one is in charge of Usenet as a whole.
Each news server is in charge of the people who own it.
They get to make up their own minds what groups their
server will carry.
No news admin has to follow the control messages of
the board.
Marty
--
Co-chair of the Big-8 Management Board (B8MB) <http://www.big-8.org>
Unless otherwise indicated, I speak for myself, not for the Board.
Alexander Bartolich
Yowie wrote:
> [...]
> Any group with a negligible amount of on-topic posts such that a
> passer-by would be hard pressed to find one post, let along a meaningful
> conversation, in amongst the kookery and crossposts serves no useful
> purpose and just wastes bandwidth. Having such a group in the Big 8 also
> reflects poorly on the Big 8, as well as the RSoF.
Fair enough.
> [...]
> At least one other method of improving the signal:noise ratio deserves
> an honest attempt before the last few leave. But if that doesn't work,
> well, that just leaves another abandoned group in the Big 8 wasting
> bandwidth and making a mockery of the subject it was intended to
> discuss. I really do believe that there should be a method of group
> deletion just as there is a method of group creation, but I am not 'in
> charge'.
But then, by the same standard, I have to say that above paragraph
reflects poorly on you. news.groups.proposals is full of removal
requests.
Analyzing a group, writing a report, presenting it to the board, and
defending the case, is a lot of work. Understanding the substance of
True Quakerism (TM) is a lot of work. Especially for people that co-
nsider religion to be the opiate of the masses.
It is a bit rich to demand all this work from the board and then not
give news.groups.proposals even a cursory glance.
Ciao
Alexander.
Seebs
> But then, by the same standard, I have to say that above paragraph
> reflects poorly on you. news.groups.proposals is full of removal
> requests.
I think Yowie was commenting on the fact that several people had just
told her that there was no way the group could even have a control message
for its deletion issued. That, in turn, was probably a miscommunication;
I believe people were trying to communicate "we won't do it just because
you ask", but because she's not very familiar with the process, she heard
"there is no such thing as a way to remove a group."
In short, the impression given to her (and even to me, and I was surprised
because I remembered having seen groups deleted in the past) was that
there did not exist a process for removing groups. Meanwhile, when she
was asking "is there a process for removing groups", it seems that you
and some others were hearing "will you remove this group for me, because I
said so?" No, she was looking for pointers to how the proposal and voting
process would go, but since she didn't know about them, she didn't use the
right magic words, so people responded to a slightly different question,
and then she (I think) misunderstood those replies in turn.
The idea is not that, because a few people say so, the group should be
deleted; it's that we were curious as to what the procedure is like these
days, should one last attempt at producing actual conversation fail.
Steve Bonine
> I think Yowie was commenting on the fact that several people had just
> told her that there was no way the group could even have a control message
> for its deletion issued.
I suspect that Yowie understands the situation.
> That, in turn, was probably a miscommunication;
> I believe people were trying to communicate "we won't do it just because
> you ask", but because she's not very familiar with the process, she heard
> "there is no such thing as a way to remove a group."
Which, depending on your definition of the word "remove", is true.
> In short, the impression given to her (and even to me, and I was surprised
> because I remembered having seen groups deleted in the past) was that
> there did not exist a process for removing groups.
Again, it depends on your definition of "deleted" and "remove".
> Meanwhile, when she
> was asking "is there a process for removing groups", it seems that you
> and some others were hearing "will you remove this group for me, because I
> said so?" No, she was looking for pointers to how the proposal and voting
> process would go, but since she didn't know about them, she didn't use the
> right magic words, so people responded to a slightly different question,
> and then she (I think) misunderstood those replies in turn.
You are free to interpret Yowie's intent, but the rest of us have the
same freedom.
I believe that "will you remove this group for me" is a reasonably
accurate interpretation of the initial query. The actual words were,
"SRQ ought to be deleted." <86scds...@mid.individual.net>
On the other hand, I believe that Yowie grasped pretty quickly the
reality of group "removal".
It's easy to remove a line from a text file.
It's not possible to cause the removal of a newsgroup from every server
in Usenet. In fact some argue that the response to control messages to
remove a newsgroup is so anemic that such action is symbolic.
> The idea is not that, because a few people say so, the group should be
> deleted; it's that we were curious as to what the procedure is like these
> days, should one last attempt at producing actual conversation fail.
There's already actual conversation in the newsgroup. It may not be the
conversation that you would prefer, but it's there. I'm not
discouraging your efforts to steer the newsgroup in the direction that
you want it to go, but set realistic expectations for what you can
accomplish with an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup.
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
> ... In short, the impression given to her (and even to me, and I was surprised
>because I remembered having seen groups deleted in the past) was that
>there did not exist a process for removing groups.
These are the first five lines on the website that describes
the composition and activities of the Big-8 Management Board:
The Big-8 Management Board:
* creates well-named, well-used newsgroups in the Big-8 Usenet hierarchies;
* makes necessary adjustments to existing groups;
* removes groups that are not well-used; and
* assists and encourages the support of a canonical Big-8 newsgroup list by Usenet sites.
The link associated with "removes groups" is:
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:rmgroup
First heading: Removing Groups from the Big-8 Hierarchies
There is a Group Removal FAQ:
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faqs:removal
It is slanted toward questions about groups the board wants
to remove and does not quite cover the questions asked in
this thread about a group that the board is unlikely to
remove.
>Meanwhile, when she
>was asking "is there a process for removing groups", it seems that you
>and some others were hearing "will you remove this group for me, because I
>said so?" No, she was looking for pointers to how the proposal and voting
>process would go, but since she didn't know about them, she didn't use the
>right magic words, so people responded to a slightly different question,
>and then she (I think) misunderstood those replies in turn.
>The idea is not that, because a few people say so, the group should be
>deleted; it's that we were curious as to what the procedure is like these
>days, should one last attempt at producing actual conversation fail.
I hope your curiosity is now fully satisfied.
If not, let me know and I'll try again to explain how things work.
Yowie
> Seebs wrote:
>
>> I think Yowie was commenting on the fact that several people had just
>> told her that there was no way the group could even have a control
>> message
>> for its deletion issued.
>
> I suspect that Yowie understands the situation.
Mostly :-)
>> That, in turn, was probably a miscommunication;
>> I believe people were trying to communicate "we won't do it just because
>> you ask", but because she's not very familiar with the process, she heard
>> "there is no such thing as a way to remove a group."
>
> Which, depending on your definition of the word "remove", is true.
>
>> In short, the impression given to her (and even to me, and I was
>> surprised
>> because I remembered having seen groups deleted in the past) was that
>> there did not exist a process for removing groups.
>
> Again, it depends on your definition of "deleted" and "remove".
>
>> Meanwhile, when she
>> was asking "is there a process for removing groups", it seems that you
>> and some others were hearing "will you remove this group for me,
>> because I
>> said so?" No, she was looking for pointers to how the proposal and voting
>> process would go, but since she didn't know about them, she didn't use
>> the
>> right magic words, so people responded to a slightly different question,
>> and then she (I think) misunderstood those replies in turn.
>
> You are free to interpret Yowie's intent, but the rest of us have the
> same freedom.
>
> I believe that "will you remove this group for me" is a reasonably
> accurate interpretation of the initial query. The actual words were,
> "SRQ ought to be deleted." <86scds...@mid.individual.net>
Poorly worded on my part, perhaps, but that was not my intention. It was
merely enquiry as to what *process* there was to remove the group from
the official Big 8 list.
I had seen a group proposal, and figured group removal (from the Offical
Big 8 List) should be similar.
> On the other hand, I believe that Yowie grasped pretty quickly the
> reality of group "removal".
>
> It's easy to remove a line from a text file.
>
> It's not possible to cause the removal of a newsgroup from every server
> in Usenet. In fact some argue that the response to control messages to
> remove a newsgroup is so anemic that such action is symbolic.
>
>> The idea is not that, because a few people say so, the group should be
>> deleted; it's that we were curious as to what the procedure is like these
>> days, should one last attempt at producing actual conversation fail.
>
> There's already actual conversation in the newsgroup. It may not be the
> conversation that you would prefer, but it's there. I'm not discouraging
> your efforts to steer the newsgroup in the direction that you want it to
> go, but set realistic expectations for what you can accomplish with an
> unmoderated Usenet newsgroup.
Having read the SRQ archives from the past, it was clear that SRQ didn't
need moderation - the signal was high enough. High enough signal seems
to protect most unmoderated groups from being overrun by their own
personal set of kooks, trolls, spam and crossposting.
SRQ now suffers from a lack of signal, and up until about a week ago,
was flooded with all sorts of off-topic rubbish. If any are interested,
look at the 'statistics' thread which starts at
<Xns9D87EABE54...@94.75.214.90>
The statistics seemed clear: there was a gross amount of noise to very
little signal, and now since one of the signal producers has left (jeb)
there's even less likelihood of signal.
It seemed therefore logical to delete a group about Quakerism that no
longer had or has any likelihood of returning to having active
discussion of Quakerism is a waste of bandwidth (and reflects poorly on
the Big 8 and the RSoF).
The few left in SRQ are about to run an experiment to see whether we can
get things back on track. This is better, IMHO, than just the deletion
of hte group from the Big 8 list, however, if it fails, we are back to
where we started: a group with lots of 'conversation' but none of it
that could be considered even tangentially relevant to Quakerism by a
reasonable person.
It is my contention (as well as the few left in SRQ that could be
considered 'active posters') that if a group has no on-topic posts, and
is unlikley to attract on-topic posts in the future, then its just a
waste of bandwidth and ought to be deleted.
Yowie
Yowie
> On 2010-06-12, Alexander Bartolich<alexander...@gmx.at> wrote:
>> But then, by the same standard, I have to say that above paragraph
>> reflects poorly on you. news.groups.proposals is full of removal
>> requests.
>
> I think Yowie was commenting on the fact that several people had just
> told her that there was no way the group could even have a control message
> for its deletion issued. That, in turn, was probably a miscommunication;
> I believe people were trying to communicate "we won't do it just because
> you ask", but because she's not very familiar with the process, she heard
> "there is no such thing as a way to remove a group."
>
> In short, the impression given to her (and even to me, and I was surprised
> because I remembered having seen groups deleted in the past) was that
> there did not exist a process for removing groups. Meanwhile, when she
> was asking "is there a process for removing groups", it seems that you
> and some others were hearing "will you remove this group for me, because I
> said so?" No, she was looking for pointers to how the proposal and voting
> process would go, but since she didn't know about them, she didn't use the
> right magic words, so people responded to a slightly different question,
> and then she (I think) misunderstood those replies in turn.
>
> The idea is not that, because a few people say so, the group should be
> deleted; it's that we were curious as to what the procedure is like these
> days, should one last attempt at producing actual conversation fail.
Thankyou Seebs, this is an accurate summary of my thoughts on the
process thus far.
I was aware of the process for group creation. There's a proposal,
probably some re-work on the proposal, and then a vote. If the vote
passes a certain set of requirements, the group is created. If it
doesn't, it isn't.
I thought it was logical that the removal process was the same.
However, the impression I got from the various replies in this thread
was that there was 'no way' to remove a group - this struck me as
ridiculous.
I have now read the removal process as posted by Martin X. Moleski, SJ.,
and it does seem much like the group creation process.
I don't know whether I, or anyone, will follow through with a group
removal proposal if the current experiment fails. However, at least we
now know how to go about doing it if thats how we feel led. Thankyou.
Yowie
Yowie
Thankyou, this is the information I was after.
As I said up thread, I don't know whether any of us will follow through
with proposing a group removal, but at least the process is now clear if
we feel lead to go down that path.
Yowie
Alexander Bartolich
Seebs wrote:
> [...]
> I think Yowie was commenting on the fact that several people had just
> told her that there was no way the group could even have a control message
> for its deletion issued. That, in turn, was probably a miscommunication;
I appreciate your effort to conciliate.
> I believe people were trying to communicate "we won't do it just because
> you ask",
Actually, that's the smaller part of the problem.
> but because she's not very familiar with the process, she heard
> "there is no such thing as a way to remove a group."
>
> In short, the impression given to her (and even to me, and I was surprised
> because I remembered having seen groups deleted in the past) was that
> there did not exist a process for removing groups.
Hmm. Was the communication on our side really that bad?
There is indeed a process to remove groups. But we apply it only to
*dead* groups. A very old tradition says that one ought not mess with
groups that still have traffic. Soc.religion.quaker is such a group.
Personally, I think we will have to break with this tradition one day.
But doing so will open a can of big, bad, venomous worms.
I'll elaborate a bit on what the problem is.
On the top of Usenet's power hierarchy are the service providers. They
have final say on their group inventory. However, they absolutely do
not want to wield this power. Some of them just automatically create
any group that customers ask for (and no customer ever asks to remove
a group). Others delegate decisions to hierarchy maintainers.
In the case of the BIG8 that's the technical team:
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=workgroups:techteam
The page says that "The Technical Team is appointed by the Board", but
it's really the other way round. The Big-8 Management Board was created
on the insistence of the people that now form the technical team, as a
way to delegate decisions.
That puts us at the B8MB:
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faqs:b8mb_members
When you browse that site you will encounter many different kinds of
policies, rules, and procedures. What you will not find, however, is
the topic of accountability. Because there is none. The board acts
sovereign. Or rather, it could. All the policies, rules, and procedures
are really ways in which the B8MB constrains itself. What it gains by
this is that individual decisions are delegated to the general case.
Pressing contentious issues are delegated to a committee that met a
long time ago.
Rhetorical question: why is everybody so desperate to delegate?
> Meanwhile, when she
> was asking "is there a process for removing groups", it seems that you
> and some others were hearing "will you remove this group for me, because I
> said so?" No, she was looking for pointers to how the proposal and voting
> process would go, but since she didn't know about them, she didn't use the
> right magic words, so people responded to a slightly different question,
> and then she (I think) misunderstood those replies in turn.
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:rmgroup
Note: The Group Removal FAQ was recently changed, obviously in response
to this thread, but without consultation with the board. Thus it is not
clear whether contents and style of the latest amendment reflect the
majority opinion.
> The idea is not that, because a few people say so, the group should be
> deleted; it's that we were curious as to what the procedure is like these
> days, should one last attempt at producing actual conversation fail.
From 1987 to 2005 most newsgroup decisions were made by public vote.
This system had a lot of problems, but one enormous advantage: The will
of the electorate could be considered superhuman, like an act of God.
You could ask any monstrosity of a question, get back any atrocity of
an answer, and still no single person would be responsible.
With the system of the B8MB we still have ballots, but only board mem-
bers are eligible to vote. The advantage is that board members can
learn to trust each other during their term. Discussions can be brief,
since participants don't need to spin things. And arguments can be ob-
jective, since nobody has a hidden agenda.
This all will go out of the window once we start a wide-scale war of
attrition. Closing a group dominated by kooks will not get rid of the
kooks. It will just drive them to another group. Having the board decide
on religious questions (like "What is true Quakerism?") will not solve
those questions. It will just make the board itself object of a reli-
gious conflict.
And you can only take so much hate coming at you until you snap. We
all know how that ends. (Think of a bald, overweight Marlon Brando,
muttering "The horror... the horror...".) This is why service providers
and hierarchy maintainers shy away from making unpopular decisions.
This is why the B8MB clings to policies and traditions.
So is there any hope? Well, Usenet II tried the principle of "solution
through dilution" by establishing so called Hierarchy Czars. Like the
B8MB they ruled without popular vote, but were exposed to a much smaller
set of groups. Usenet II failed, but the success of small, specialized
web boards shows that the principle is good.
(At this point the audience, sensing a commencing call for volunteers,
rapidly leaves the premises.)
Ciao
Alexander.
Sir David
> SRQ now suffers from a lack of signal, and up until about a week ago,
> was flooded with all sorts of off-topic rubbish. If any are interested,
> look at the 'statistics' thread which starts at
> <Xns9D87EABE54310NoIdent...@94.75.214.90>
That thread was a rather transparent effort to gin up "statistics" to
support the wishes of a small coterie (tinc) of SRQ posters who want
(or wanted) to destroy the group because they dislike the content.
Notice that the criteria for calling something "signal" or "noise" are
purely based on who's posting, and the so-called "signal" is pretty
much the coterie itself (tinc), and the "noise" is anyone whose posts
they (tinc) don't like.
The self-appointed coterie (tinc) frequently chit-chat about anything
and everything in their daily lives, utterly unrelated to the
chartered subject of the group (the Religious Society of Friends, aka
RSof and Quakers). Some of the posters labeled "noise" frequently post
about RSoF, but the coterie (tinc) doesn't like what they post. Too
bad. So sad. The group is not dead; there are regular conversation
threads, both on-topic and off, including pretty much all of the self-
appointed arbiters of signal and noise, as well as conversations, both
on- and off-topic, including those accused of being "noise." Sometimes
the elite (tine) deign to converse with those labeled "noise", but
when they get pissed off about it, they try to prevent anyone else
from engaging the so-called noisemakers. Their efforts are futile, as
this is an unmoderated newsgroup.
Miscellaneous off-topic chatter about a few posters' daily lives,
posts about world politics, and other threads, are labeled signal,
while Crunchy's kooky and misguided tirades about Quaker meetings are
labeled noise. By charter, it would be the other way 'round. A very
small number of posters decided that they want to destroy an
unmoderated newsgroup because they don't like what others are posting.
I have tried, on a few occasion, to disabuse them of their
misconceptions, but I'm just noise, so the self-appointed signalers
can discount what I say.
First, there is no central authority that actually controls Usenet,
and any rmgroup message can and will be ignored by many or most
newsservers, including most of the major players. Second, the
authority, such as it is, that could send out a rmgroup to be ignored,
is unlikely to delete a group that has frequent on-topic
conversations. Especially when the attempted newsgroup killers are
part of those conversations. So now, some of the coterie (tinc) are
getting their backs up because a few Usenet mavens with no ax to grind
are calling it like it is. So the backpedaling and re-phrasing ensues,
much to the amusement of those of us who enjoy Usenet as a source of
entertainment.
So some people don't like the content. Get over it. Make your own
forum elsewhere. Follow your latest messiah to the promised land where
you can chit-chat to your hearts delight (and cross post all that off-
topic banality to SRQ, of course, further proving that SRQ is not
dead). Hehe. The new messiah is insisting on very exacting adherence
to his master plan, but nobody seems to have mentioned the huge flaw
that's blatantly obvious to anyone who 1) reads the group with Gurgle
groups, and 2) has at least a fragment of clue in their head. But the
messiah's demands must be followed, I guess. Not that I have a dog in
that fight; I'll almost certainly be blacklisted, which really doesn't
make much of a difference to me. I've been all over the unmoderated
Usenet for over 25 years, and never had cause to use a moderated
group. I got used to using killfiles long ago, and shortly thereafter,
learned that they aren't even necessary.
On unmoderated Usenet, I have no control over what anyone posts other
than via ordinary persuation. But I have complete control over what I
read, and what I respond to. That's enough. If you want to control
others on Usenet, you are bound to be disappointed and frustrated.
Some things are completely clear. SRQ is alive, by the standards of
the Big 8 board, or whatever they're called lately. They might send
out a rmgroup if it were dead, but they won't be swayed by three or
four posters who simply don't like other posters. And even if they
were swayed, their rmgroup would not actually kill the group. Watching
this whole charade play out is more entertaining than television!
Viva Usenet!
Seebs
> ["Followup-To:" header set to news.groups.]
Reset because some of the participants may not know how to swap
over. :)
> Hmm. Was the communication on our side really that bad?
I don't know -- it may have been just a coincidence or something,
but I had also gotten the impression that there was no such
procedure.
> There is indeed a process to remove groups. But we apply it only to
> *dead* groups. A very old tradition says that one ought not mess with
> groups that still have traffic. Soc.religion.quaker is such a group.
What constitutes "traffic"? Is spam traffic?
> This all will go out of the window once we start a wide-scale war of
> attrition. Closing a group dominated by kooks will not get rid of the
> kooks.
I am not at all sure of this. In the case where the kooks appear to be
motivated either by personal animosity, or by not knowing anything about
what's happening, I think it might.
> It will just drive them to another group. Having the board decide
> on religious questions (like "What is true Quakerism?") will not solve
> those questions. It will just make the board itself object of a reli-
> gious conflict.
I don't think you will EVER find quakers who are going to think that
a question like "what is true Quakerism" are at issue.
The issue here is not any kind of dispute about whether or not posts
are acceptable Quakerism. It's people who post regularly -- many, many
times a day, in some cases -- with long rants about how, despite having
anal sex, they are not gay, and they are sick of people saying they're
gay. Some of them have been posting this stuff for upwards of a decade.
I don't think the traffic is substantively different from viagra spam.
Steve Bonine
> There is indeed a process to remove groups. But we apply it only to
> *dead* groups. A very old tradition says that one ought not mess with
> groups that still have traffic. Soc.religion.quaker is such a group.
>
> Personally, I think we will have to break with this tradition one day.
I am not holding my breath.
On Oct. 2, 2007, the board published an official RESULT informing us
that they had decided to "remove low-traffic unmoderated gorups [sic]."
<nan.20071002175933$5c...@killfile.org>
In the intervening 2+ years, absolutely nothing has happened.
If the board can't even figure out how to remove "low-traffic" gorups,
chances are vanishingly small that they will make any effort to remove
"groups that still have traffic", especially if much of that traffic
could be considered on-topic. (Depends on who's doing the considering.)
Once upon a time I thought that the effort to cleanse the canonical list
of newsgroups was a noble project. After observing the outpouring of
hate and rhetoric that was the result of even the smallest effort to
accomplish this goal, I realized that the effort was MUCH larger than I
had imagined. Why spend time fighting about whether to send
largely-ignored rmgroup commands for unmoderated newsgroups?
Notice that I used the term "cleanse the canonical list" rather than
something like "remove groups". I am under no illusion that anything
that the board does in terms of "removing" newsgroups will have a
significant impact on what users actually see. That's another parameter
in my decision-making process; why spend many hours when the end result
is simply removing lines from a text file?
As near as I can tell, Usenet is now the domain of computer geeks. It's
a great place to come for information on obscure and/or obsolete
computer software. OS/2 is alive and well in Usenet, if nowhere else.
If you want to talk about non-computer topics, Usenet is not the place
to be. According to a moderator of misc.kids.moderated, there are no
longer on-topic submissions.
<08d623c5-5c24-48ee...@x21g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>
There was an underwhelming response to soc.religion.christian, now
officially gone. If Usenet can't sustain a newsgroup on "kids" or the
Christian religion, what does that tell you about the current population
of Usenet?
Sir David
> It's people who post regularly -- many, many
> times a day, in some cases -- with long rants about how, despite having
> anal sex, they are not gay, and they are sick of people saying they're
> gay.
"People", "they", "they", "they're"; all in the plural.
There's one single person who posts such things, not all
of his posts have the content you mention, and he hasn't
posted anything in SRQ for many weeks. Don't try to bloat
your position by pretending there are many such posters,
it's a lie.
Such claims as you make are very easy to verify, so such
dishonesty is very easy to expose. Is lying about the content
of the froupthe kind of "Quakerly" behavior that you think
should donimate?
It's trivial to ignore one person's posts, and trivial to
put him in a killfile. If you don't like the looneys ranting
on the sidewalk, just move on. Don't try to have the sidewalk
closed and torn up!
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
<hv1918$8qi$1...@news.albasani.net>:
>http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:rmgroup
>Note: The Group Removal FAQ was recently changed, obviously in response
>to this thread, but without consultation with the board. Thus it is not
>clear whether contents and style of the latest amendment reflect the
>majority opinion.
That is how all of the FAQs developed. None of them have been
voted on by the board; they are not policy documents, though
they do try to explain the board's policies, where they exist.
Kathy Morgan
> (At this point the audience, sensing a commencing call for volunteers,
> rapidly leaves the premises.)
LOL!
--
Kathy
Alexander Bartolich
> [...]
> On Oct. 2, 2007, the board published an official RESULT informing us
> that they had decided to "remove low-traffic unmoderated gorups [sic]."
> <nan.20071002175933$5c...@killfile.org>
That's interesting. Thank you for sharing the ID.
> In the intervening 2+ years, absolutely nothing has happened.
Of course. Waiting for volunteers to march onward does not work.
# Stage 1a: Once per year, the B8MB will make a call in
# news.announce.newgroups for traffic data on low traffic groups.
# Interested individuals may submit lists of low traffic groups.
> If the board can't even figure out how to remove "low-traffic" gorups,
> chances are vanishingly small that they will make any effort to remove
> "groups that still have traffic", especially if much of that traffic
> could be considered on-topic. (Depends on who's doing the considering.)
Fair enough.
> Once upon a time I thought that the effort to cleanse the canonical list
> of newsgroups was a noble project. After observing the outpouring of
> hate and rhetoric that was the result of even the smallest effort to
> accomplish this goal, I realized that the effort was MUCH larger than I
> had imagined.
Usenet is made out of hate and rhetoric. It is no surprise then that
the dust and residue involved with construction work also consists of
hate and rhetoric.
> Why spend time fighting about whether to send
> largely-ignored rmgroup commands for unmoderated newsgroups?
Servers running on auto-pilot will eventually close down. And the rift
between providers of unfiltered binary groups and old-school text-only
Usenet will grow until these two worlds drift apart.
> Notice that I used the term "cleanse the canonical list" rather than
> something like "remove groups". I am under no illusion that anything
> that the board does in terms of "removing" newsgroups will have a
> significant impact on what users actually see.
As long as you (and all the other customers of news.individual.net)
see the effect I am satisified.
> [...]
> As near as I can tell, Usenet is now the domain of computer geeks. It's
> a great place to come for information on obscure and/or obsolete
> computer software. OS/2 is alive and well in Usenet, if nowhere else.
Comp.os.os2.announce is still not working, actually.
> If you want to talk about non-computer topics, Usenet is not the place
> to be. According to a moderator of misc.kids.moderated, there are no
> longer on-topic submissions.
I think that misc.kids.* was always a bit odd.
If there is such a thing as the uniqe selling proposition of Usenet
then it certainly is freedom of speech. Parenting, on the other hand,
is all about spinning a cocoon to protect those poor, little, innocent
kiddies from the big bad world. Perhaps the next generation of parents,
the one that grew up with rotten.com and 4chan, will think different.
But for now Usenet is both too smutty to be considered by parents,
and to earnest to be considered cool by kids.
> There was an underwhelming response to soc.religion.christian, now
> officially gone. If Usenet can't sustain a newsgroup on "kids" or the
> Christian religion, what does that tell you about the current population
> of Usenet?
They are all freaks, just like me?
Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
> Steve Bonine wrote:
>> Once upon a time I thought that the effort to cleanse the canonical list
>> of newsgroups was a noble project. After observing the outpouring of
>> hate and rhetoric that was the result of even the smallest effort to
>> accomplish this goal, I realized that the effort was MUCH larger than I
>> had imagined.
>
> Usenet is made out of hate and rhetoric. It is no surprise then that
> the dust and residue involved with construction work also consists of
> hate and rhetoric.
Hate and rhetoric are not the only constituents of Usenet. There's a
lot of the opposite of hate; I'll use the word camaraderie.
The problem is that whoever is managing the hierarchy wants to serve the
needs and desires of the people who are using the newsgroups. In the
specific case of removing dead groups, there was much wailing and
gnashing of teeth from people who posted passionately against removing
them. It's much easier to mount a passionate argument in favor of
keeping a favorite newsgroup than to support removing it because it's no
longer useful. When you look at the discussion in an effort to gauge
what the community wants, it's "obvious" that the consensus is to keep
the dead groups around.
>> Why spend time fighting about whether to send
>> largely-ignored rmgroup commands for unmoderated newsgroups?
>
> Servers running on auto-pilot will eventually close down. And the rift
> between providers of unfiltered binary groups and old-school text-only
> Usenet will grow until these two worlds drift apart.
At this point in the life of Usenet, I see three segments of provider.
There are the servers running on auto-pilot, the well-managed small
servers that handle text Usenet, and the large providers of binary groups.
I agree that the auto-pilot servers will die. The fact that they've
lasted this long is a testament to the staying power of the software and
the amazing effect of momentum.
But I don't see the "rift" between the other two segments. Why should
these big providers stop offering text newsgroups? It's costing them
nothing; the disk space that text Usenet consumes pales in comparison to
the binary groups, as does the bandwidth and other resource
requirements. But there's a nice revenue stream coming in from
consumers who don't realize that they don't have to pay for binary
groups if they don't want to avail themselves of binary groups, and from
ISPs who subcontract their news service.
Then there's Google. I mention it only because such a high percentage
of current text Usenet traffic originates there. I thought that when an
rmgroup was issued that Google tagged the newsgroup with a note that the
group was no longer available for posting, but kept the archive. This
morning I checked the most current batch of moderated newsgroups that
were removed, and none of them exist at Google. I conclude that Google
is now removing the archive for a group when the group is closed, which
I find surprising and disappointing.
>> Notice that I used the term "cleanse the canonical list" rather than
>> something like "remove groups". I am under no illusion that anything
>> that the board does in terms of "removing" newsgroups will have a
>> significant impact on what users actually see.
>
> As long as you (and all the other customers of news.individual.net)
> see the effect I am satisified.
Understood.
I wish I knew what percentage of current Usenet users see a change based
on the board issuing an rmgroup.
>> [...]
>> As near as I can tell, Usenet is now the domain of computer geeks. It's
>> a great place to come for information on obscure and/or obsolete
>> computer software. OS/2 is alive and well in Usenet, if nowhere else.
>
> Comp.os.os2.announce is still not working, actually.
There are 26 newsgroups in the comp.os.os2 hierarchy. Several of them
continue to have on-topic traffic.
>> If Usenet can't sustain a newsgroup on "kids" or the
>> Christian religion, what does that tell you about the current population
>> of Usenet?
>
> They are all freaks, just like me?
Replace "freak" with "computer geek", and yes, that's exactly what I am
saying. I have yet to meet a non-computer person who even knows what
Usenet is. They are obviously out there populating the non-technical
newsgroups; on the other hand, I wonder how many of the participants in
the non-computer-related groups happen to be computer geeks who are also
interested in gardening or using sourdough or brewing beer. There are
not enough computer geeks left to sustain a discussion on religion or
parenting, and we're unable to attract new users.
I rather think that Usenet will come full circle. It started as the
domain of a tiny segment of the population who had access to the
Internet and cared enough to climb the learning curve to use a facility
that wasn't particularly user friendly. It progressed through growing
pains into the era affectionately called Eternal September and the user
mix changed completely. Now we're entering the Eternal December phase,
reminiscent of when all the students went home for Christmas break and
traffic plummeted.
To get back to the topic of removing dead groups . . . at this point in
the life cycle of Usenet it seems rather pointless. This is even more
true if Google is removing archives based on an rmgroup; the fact that a
newsgroup is currently dead doesn't mean that there's not valuable or at
least interesting historical information from years gone by. The
cost/benefit isn't there, especially if the net benefit just turned
negative.
Alexander Bartolich
> Alexander Bartolich wrote:
>> Steve Bonine wrote:
>
>>> Once upon a time I thought that the effort to cleanse the canonical list
>>> of newsgroups was a noble project. After observing the outpouring of
>>> hate and rhetoric that was the result of even the smallest effort to
>>> accomplish this goal, I realized that the effort was MUCH larger than I
>>> had imagined.
>>
>> Usenet is made out of hate and rhetoric. It is no surprise then that
>> the dust and residue involved with construction work also consists of
>> hate and rhetoric.
>
> Hate and rhetoric are not the only constituents of Usenet. There's a
> lot of the opposite of hate; I'll use the word camaraderie.
Sure. To get things done you ought to be a team player. If there is
nothing to do, however, harmonic camaraderie tends to produce zero
traffic.
> The problem is that whoever is managing the hierarchy wants to serve the
> needs and desires of the people who are using the newsgroups. In the
> specific case of removing dead groups, there was much wailing and
> gnashing of teeth from people who posted passionately against removing
> them.
This is no different from real life politics. Whatever you do, you'll
always encounter a vehemently protesting special interest group.
> It's much easier to mount a passionate argument in favor of
> keeping a favorite newsgroup than to support removing it because it's no
> longer useful. When you look at the discussion in an effort to gauge
> what the community wants, it's "obvious" that the consensus is to keep
> the dead groups around.
Usenet is different from real life in that both gain and cost are en-
tirely virtual. There is no money to earn with hierarchy management.
And having more groups does not mean that subscription fees go up.
Still, if everybody gets to keep his dead pet group then a barren
wasteland of deserted groups is the result.
It is obvious that experienced users are indifferent to the frustration
that dead groups pose to newbiews. It is equally obvious, however, that
the missing influx of new users is Usenet's biggest problem.
> [...]
> But I don't see the "rift" between the other two segments. Why should
> these big providers stop offering text newsgroups? It's costing them
> nothing; the disk space that text Usenet consumes pales in comparison to
> the binary groups, as does the bandwidth and other resource
> requirements.
Binary providers act on the cutting edge of technology. They work with
tremendous bandwith and cannot afford the CPU cycles required by spam
filters. A text-only server peering with a binary provider is really at
the mercy of warez traders. When they decide to post their stuff outside
of alt.bin* then the only defense is to cut the peering connection.
> [...]
> To get back to the topic of removing dead groups . . . at this point in
> the life cycle of Usenet it seems rather pointless.
It's actually quite simple. When the traffic increases you create
groups. When the traffic decreases you remove groups. There are already
two general purpose create-only hierarchies, namely alt.* and free.*.
It's pointless to let the BIG8 join them.
Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
> Usenet is different from real life in that both gain and cost are en-
> tirely virtual.
I rather disagree. I consider my time to be worth something. It's not
that I can convert my time into money, but if I spend time working to
remove dead groups, that's time that I'm not spending doing something
else. Of course, here I sit right now investing time in discussing this
issue, and I should be doing something else.
> There is no money to earn with hierarchy management.
True. But there's money to be earned with negative management. By that
I mean that some of the larger providers market their product based on
the number of newsgroups that they offer. It is not in the interest of
this marketing plan to reduce the number of groups by paying attention
to the board's rmgroups.
> And having more groups does not mean that subscription fees go up.
No, but if you believe the marketing department, it means more subscribers.
> Still, if everybody gets to keep his dead pet group then a barren
> wasteland of deserted groups is the result.
That is indeed an accurate description of the current situation.
> It is obvious that experienced users are indifferent to the frustration
> that dead groups pose to newbiews. It is equally obvious, however, that
> the missing influx of new users is Usenet's biggest problem.
Agreed, and agreed. But unless you can figure out a way to attract new
users, you've just provided a strong argument against removing dead groups.
> It's actually quite simple. When the traffic increases you create
> groups. When the traffic decreases you remove groups. There are already
> two general purpose create-only hierarchies, namely alt.* and free.*.
> It's pointless to let the BIG8 join them.
Except that the big-8 already has joined them. Of the 2000+ groups
currently listed, somewhere between 500 and 1800 are dead, depending on
the definition of "dead". If your simple precept had been followed for
the past few decades, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But now is
it justified to expend the effort to catch up with decades of neglect?
This project has three strikes against it. First, dead groups don't
affect most users since they know how to cope with the situation.
Second, the amount of work is daunting, especially if multiple RFDs are
required for each individual newsgroup. And the third strike is what
actually happens when the rmgroup is sent -- there are two many users
receiving service from servers that ignore rmgroup.
Doug Freyburger
> Alexander Bartolich wrote:
>> Steve Bonine wrote:
>
>>> Once upon a time I thought that the effort to cleanse the canonical list
>>> of newsgroups was a noble project. After observing the outpouring of
>>> hate and rhetoric that was the result of even the smallest effort to
>>> accomplish this goal, I realized that the effort was MUCH larger than I
>>> had imagined.
>
>> Usenet is made out of hate and rhetoric. It is no surprise then that
>> the dust and residue involved with construction work also consists of
>> hate and rhetoric.
Once upon a time there was also the concept that anyone can and should
kill file anyone else viewed as a problem. Hate and rhetoric are a fine
criterion for kill file entries. Why not just discuss the topic of
removing groups that are unused post-kill-file and be open about kill
filing anyone who tries to be disruptive of the process?
There is rhetoric that members of the board should read NG without kill
files. It's abusive nonsense by the haters who on other groups tell
readers to kill file them. It's exactly the sort of rhetoric that
should get posters into kill files and thus ignored in any policy
disucssion. Landing in someone else's kill file is always an act of the
poster first and of the reader second.
> Hate and rhetoric are not the only constituents of Usenet. There's a
> lot of the opposite of hate; I'll use the word camaraderie.
UseNet is long lived compard to almost anything else on line other than
e-mail. it gives folks time to become old and close friends over a
period of many years. Some will claim that on-line correspondants are
not real friends, but who that has had a penpal using paper mail will
claim that pen pals do not become real friends across the years?
> The problem is that whoever is managing the hierarchy wants to serve the
> needs and desires of the people who are using the newsgroups.
Using the group includes those who have ended up in kill files and since
kill files are not shared there is not a good objective description of
when a group is dead based on the post-kill-file traffic. To a great
extent the percentage of posts killed tells a better tale of the health
of a group than an absence of posts.
The distinction between abuse "of" Usenet and abuse "on" UseNet has this
exact same problem. One can be objectively measured; the other is
subjective. But it's not difficult to tell who's an abuser. It is
however a decision that is easy to make manually but extremely hard to
automate. Google's user profile system is as good as I've seen for
that. It accepts and records user ratings.
> In the
> specific case of removing dead groups, there was much wailing and
> gnashing of teeth from people who posted passionately against removing
> them.
Who can get ignored by the simple expedient of kill files whenever they
become abusive. Some folks can stay civil; some become abusive.
There's a gray scale between those two poles. Just keep adding posters
to the kill file and at some point the discussion becomes civil. This
is not difficult in concept. I think the reason NGP was chartered as
moderated was really to take into account that folks arriving there do
not come with a fully populated kill file - They have a strong need of a
civil environment in which to work.
> It's much easier to mount a passionate argument in favor of
> keeping a favorite newsgroup than to support removing it because it's no
> longer useful. When you look at the discussion in an effort to gauge
> what the community wants, it's "obvious" that the consensus is to keep
> the dead groups around.
A fair number of the moderated groups that have been discussed have seen
little objection. Combining the kill file concept with that works.
There has been comparatively few rejections on NGP and heavy kill file
use on NG shows little controversy as well. Kill file the abusive
posters and see what level of controversy there is over removing groups
from canonical list. Very little. Nearly all of those who object at
the ones who have already been abusive enough to get into kill files and
thus ignored.
That's a core principle of UseNet at work that seems to have been
forgotten in discussions about newsgroup creation and removal and policy
- Kill files are for those who have earned their way into them and those
who are in kill files are ignored.
>>> Why spend time fighting about whether to send
>>> largely-ignored rmgroup commands for unmoderated newsgroups?
>
>> Servers running on auto-pilot will eventually close down. And the rift
>> between providers of unfiltered binary groups and old-school text-only
>> Usenet will grow until these two worlds drift apart.
>
> At this point in the life of Usenet, I see three segments of provider.
> There are the servers running on auto-pilot, the well-managed small
> servers that handle text Usenet, and the large providers of binary groups.
The autopilot servers and binary servers ignore rmgroup control methods
generally. Many even ignore newgroup control messages until one of
their users requests it. This is a good argument against removing
groups from the canonical list.
> I agree that the auto-pilot servers will die. The fact that they've
> lasted this long is a testament to the staying power of the software and
> the amazing effect of momentum.
But that does leave the well managed small servers that handle text
Usenet. That is a good argument in favor of removing groups from the
canonical list.
> But I don't see the "rift" between the other two segments. Why should
> these big providers stop offering text newsgroups? It's costing them
> nothing; the disk space that text Usenet consumes pales in comparison to
> the binary groups, as does the bandwidth and other resource
> requirements. But there's a nice revenue stream coming in from
> consumers who don't realize that they don't have to pay for binary
> groups if they don't want to avail themselves of binary groups, and from
> ISPs who subcontract their news service.
>
> Then there's Google. I mention it only because such a high percentage
> of current text Usenet traffic originates there. I thought that when an
> rmgroup was issued that Google tagged the newsgroup with a note that the
> group was no longer available for posting, but kept the archive. This
> morning I checked the most current batch of moderated newsgroups that
> were removed, and none of them exist at Google. I conclude that Google
> is now removing the archive for a group when the group is closed, which
> I find surprising and disappointing.
The archive is as valuable as Google's control of abuse makes it. Sigh.
> To get back to the topic of removing dead groups . . . at this point in
> the life cycle of Usenet it seems rather pointless. This is even more
> true if Google is removing archives based on an rmgroup; the fact that a
> newsgroup is currently dead doesn't mean that there's not valuable or at
> least interesting historical information from years gone by. The
> cost/benefit isn't there, especially if the net benefit just turned
> negative.
Agreed. Though to me the biggest problem is finding folks willing to
volunteer to go through the process of removing dead groups. There's
some very nice effort on the list of moderated group but none on the
list of unmoderated groups. The fact that I could volunteer to do that
work but I don't says much. I do volunteer work on UseNet but have not
touched dead group removal. If I don't who else will value it enough to
do so?
Steve Bonine
> Though to me the biggest problem is finding folks willing to
> volunteer to go through the process of removing dead groups. There's
> some very nice effort on the list of moderated group but none on the
> list of unmoderated groups. The fact that I could volunteer to do that
> work but I don't says much. I do volunteer work on UseNet but have not
> touched dead group removal. If I don't who else will value it enough to
> do so?
There are basic differences between the process of removing moderated
newsgroups versus unmoderated ones. One of the big hurdles in the past
was the definition of "dead". This isn't an issue with moderated
newsgroups. If the submission results in an email bounce, the group is
dead. Starting with a Moderator Vacancy Investigation is different than
starting from a personal belief that the newsgroup is defunct. For one
thing, there's no possibility that the (moderated) newsgroup will
spontaneously spring back to life.
The only way that the big-8 canonical list will be brought back into
something that reflects reality is if there is a mass purge. The idea
of writing an RFD for each individual newsgroup is just silly when
you're talking about 1000 groups. In the past, this concept has been
greeted with derision by the population of news.groups. That population
has changed significantly in the past several months; I wonder if it has
changed enough that such a project could actually move forward.
Alexander Bartolich
> [...]
> Using the group includes those who have ended up in kill files and since
> kill files are not shared there is not a good objective description of
> when a group is dead based on the post-kill-file traffic. To a great
> extent the percentage of posts killed tells a better tale of the health
> of a group than an absence of posts.
>
> The distinction between abuse "of" Usenet and abuse "on" UseNet has this
> exact same problem. One can be objectively measured; the other is
> subjective. But it's not difficult to tell who's an abuser. It is
> however a decision that is easy to make manually but extremely hard to
> automate. Google's user profile system is as good as I've seen for
> that. It accepts and records user ratings.
Honestly, I don't understand what you are saying. Perhaps that is be-
cause my world view is very different. To me there are only two types
of users. One type is deliberately mean to others. The other type only
unintentionally. The only way to avoid being killfiled is to give up
posting.
Ciao
Alexander.
Alexander Bartolich
>
> There are basic differences between the process of removing moderated
These are all very good items. But I would like to add another one:
Moderators deserve respect for the work they have put into the group.
And of course their opinion on the future of the group has weight.
> [...]
> The only way that the big-8 canonical list will be brought back into
> something that reflects reality is if there is a mass purge. The idea
> of writing an RFD for each individual newsgroup is just silly when
> you're talking about 1000 groups.
You do realize that I can actually pull that stunt off?
(Not that I consider it a good idea. I just think that "silly" is not
an appropriate adjective when you speak about the deployment of weapons
of mass destruction.)
> In the past, this concept has been
> greeted with derision by the population of news.groups. That population
> has changed significantly in the past several months; I wonder if it has
> changed enough that such a project could actually move forward.
I am more worried about the real users out there.
Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
> Steve Bonine wrote:
>>
>> There are basic differences between the process of removing moderated
>> newsgroups versus unmoderated ones. [...]
>
> These are all very good items. But I would like to add another one:
> Moderators deserve respect for the work they have put into the group.
> And of course their opinion on the future of the group has weight.
Absolutely.
I think that it's been interesting that the reaction to the vast
majority of the MVIs has been silence, but that when moderators do show
up, they usually support removing the newsgroup.
>> [...]
>> The only way that the big-8 canonical list will be brought back into
>> something that reflects reality is if there is a mass purge. The idea
>> of writing an RFD for each individual newsgroup is just silly when
>> you're talking about 1000 groups.
>
> You do realize that I can actually pull that stunt off?
I'm not sure which "stunt" you mean.
Writing 1000+ RFDs? No, I do not believe you can pull that off. You've
been making good progress on moderated newsgroups, but I count 46 groups
processed so far. There are at least 20 times as many unmoderated
newsgroups. Do you really think that 20 times the effort you've
expended so far is sustainable? I don't.
(Please don't take this as a personal challenge! I don't think it
SHOULD be done this way, even if it COULD be.)
Or do you mean that you can pull off a mass purge, removing more than
one newsgroup per RFD?
> (Not that I consider it a good idea. I just think that "silly" is not
> an appropriate adjective when you speak about the deployment of weapons
> of mass destruction.)
I see exactly two options, based on what has happened in the past 2+
years since the board told us that they were going to remove dead
groups. Option 1: Do nothing. Option 2: Think outside the box and
figure out a way to actually DO IT.
Either option is OK, but you're deluding yourself if you think that
processing 1000 RFDs is going to happen.
>> In the past, this concept has been
>> greeted with derision by the population of news.groups. That population
>> has changed significantly in the past several months; I wonder if it has
>> changed enough that such a project could actually move forward.
>
> I am more worried about the real users out there.
I'm not. If an accurate definition of "dead" is applied and legitimate
objections are noted, users won't be affected. Look at the history of
recent removals of dead moderated newsgroups. There's no difference
between removing a group that's dead because of no moderator and
removing one that's equally dead because there have been no on-topic
submissions.
Unfortunately, this part of the discussion does not treat (1) the fact
that so many users are served by systems that ignore rmgroups, (2) the
possibility that Google will remove archived articles for these newsgroups.
Alexander Bartolich
> Alexander Bartolich wrote:
>> These are all very good items. But I would like to add another one:
>> Moderators deserve respect for the work they have put into the group.
>> And of course their opinion on the future of the group has weight.
>
> Absolutely.
>
> I think that it's been interesting that the reaction to the vast
> majority of the MVIs has been silence, but that when moderators do show
> up, they usually support removing the newsgroup.
That's because you only see the groups where I actually start a formal
MVI. Moderator that react to my probe message usually want to keep
their group, even if it has been empty for many months.
>>> [...]
>>> The only way that the big-8 canonical list will be brought back into
>>> something that reflects reality is if there is a mass purge. The idea
>>> of writing an RFD for each individual newsgroup is just silly when
>>> you're talking about 1000 groups.
>>
>> You do realize that I can actually pull that stunt off?
>
> I'm not sure which "stunt" you mean.
>
> Writing 1000+ RFDs? No, I do not believe you can pull that off. You've
> been making good progress on moderated newsgroups, but I count 46 groups
> processed so far. There are at least 20 times as many unmoderated
> newsgroups. Do you really think that 20 times the effort you've
> expended so far is sustainable? I don't.
Well, with moderated groups I have to wait for a response to my probe
message. I can expect five different things:
a) a bounce mail
b) an automatic message from moderation system
c) a message from the moderators saying that they want to keep the group
d) a message from the moderators saying that they resign
e) nothing
Upon a) I start an MVI, the rationale being the error extracted from
the bounce. Upon b) and c) I just take a note that the group is off
limits. Upon d) I start an MVA. And e) means I have to browse Google's
archive for the last approved message in order to write a nice rationale.
Writing RFDs for unmoderated, dead groups can be completely automatized,
however. (Indeed I already have implemented all required functionality.
The only thing missing is a script that queries Google's for the latest
archived message.)
> (Please don't take this as a personal challenge! I don't think it
> SHOULD be done this way, even if it COULD be.)
But personal challenges are fun!
> Or do you mean that you can pull off a mass purge, removing more than
> one newsgroup per RFD?
As far as I know that would require adoption of a new policy by the
board. Based on my experiences with the MVI process I would say that
a solid majority does not like procedural shortcuts. (On the other hand
someone suggested a mass creation of groups in reaction to the recent
shut down of Microsoft's news server.)
> [...]
> I see exactly two options, based on what has happened in the past 2+
> years since the board told us that they were going to remove dead
> groups. Option 1: Do nothing. Option 2: Think outside the box and
> figure out a way to actually DO IT.
>
> Either option is OK, but you're deluding yourself if you think that
> processing 1000 RFDs is going to happen.
But playing armchair general on the issue is fun!
(By the way, you might remember that I started the purge of moderated
groups under similar circumstances and on the same motives.)
>> [...]
>> I am more worried about the real users out there.
>
> I'm not. If an accurate definition of "dead" is applied and legitimate
> objections are noted, users won't be affected. Look at the history of
> recent removals of dead moderated newsgroups. There's no difference
> between removing a group that's dead because of no moderator and
> removing one that's equally dead because there have been no on-topic
> submissions.
The difference is that moderated groups are strongly associated with
their moderaters, i.e. they are generally considered to be the sole
"owners". On the other hand affection to unmoderated groups can take
strange forms.
> Unfortunately, this part of the discussion does not treat (1) the fact
> that so many users are served by systems that ignore rmgroups, (2) the
> possibility that Google will remove archived articles for these newsgroups.
I think it's enough of a challenge to take proper care of the things
we are responsible for.
Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
> Steve Bonine wrote:
>> Unfortunately, this part of the discussion does not treat (1) the fact
>> that so many users are served by systems that ignore rmgroups, (2) the
>> possibility that Google will remove archived articles for these newsgroups.
>
> I think it's enough of a challenge to take proper care of the things
> we are responsible for.
Yes, but . . .
The removal of dead groups from the newsgroup list is a good thing.
The removal of Google's archive of articles for a group that is now dead
but once was the premier source of information on a topic is a bad
thing. That archive may be the only remaining repository of important
information.
I think it's only prudent to be aware of the side effects of taking care
Yowie
> ["Followup-To:" header set to news.groups.]
>
> Seebs wrote:
>> [...]
>> I think Yowie was commenting on the fact that several people had just
>> told her that there was no way the group could even have a control
>> message for its deletion issued. That, in turn, was probably a
>> miscommunication;
>
> I appreciate your effort to conciliate.
>
>> I believe people were trying to communicate "we won't do it just
>> because you ask",
>
> Actually, that's the smaller part of the problem.
>
>> but because she's not very familiar with the process, she heard
>> "there is no such thing as a way to remove a group."
>>
>> In short, the impression given to her (and even to me, and I was
>> surprised because I remembered having seen groups deleted in the
>> past) was that there did not exist a process for removing groups.
>
> Hmm. Was the communication on our side really that bad?
>
> There is indeed a process to remove groups. But we apply it only to
> *dead* groups. A very old tradition says that one ought not mess with
> groups that still have traffic. Soc.religion.quaker is such a group.
>
> Personally, I think we will have to break with this tradition one day.
> But doing so will open a can of big, bad, venomous worms.
*snip*
> This all will go out of the window once we start a wide-scale war of
> attrition. Closing a group dominated by kooks will not get rid of the
> kooks. It will just drive them to another group. Having the board
> decide on religious questions (like "What is true Quakerism?") will
> not solve those questions. It will just make the board itself object
> of a reli- gious conflict.
To me, the better question would be 'What would constitute reasonable
content?'.
I fully understand that 'unmoderated' means that anyone can post anything.
However, 'healthy' unmoderated groups have enough posters posting
'generally' about the topic of the newsgroup that they keep out all but the
hardiest of kooks/ trolls/spammers, and even then, can find ways of workign
around such things so that the group more or less works.
Its when a critical number of the 'mostly on topic' posters dissappear that
the people who don't give a fig about the topic of the unmoderated newsgroup
move in and treat it as their personal playground, much to the frustation of
the few who wish to actually discuss the subject given in the newsgroup
name.
I would strongly suspect that there are many groups like this on Usenet, and
that there are even some that come under the Big 8 banner.
If it is truly the attitude of the Big 8 management team that 'any traffic
is good traffic', does this not make a mockery of the name of the group and
the charter of the group? Why not just create talk.whatever1, talk.whatever2
instead?
I thought that the whole point of making subject specific groups was to have
that subject discussed.
If that subject is no longer effectively being discussed in that group, has
not been effectively discussed for quite some time, and is unlikely to ever
be effectively discussed again, what is the point of carrying a group whose
contents have next to nothing to do with its name or the charter in which it
was created?
Yes, I realise it would be alot of work going through such groups and making
a value judgement on whether the contents of the group could be considered
relevant to the name of the group. But on the same token a large number of
high traffic, no content newsgroups are a mammoth waste of bandwidth and
serve as an excellent example of why ISPs should drop Usenet.
> (At this point the audience, sensing a commencing call for volunteers,
> rapidly leaves the premises.)
Volunteers for what? For determining which groups in the Big 8 are
'abandoned' or 'dead'? How much time would this take up per week, and what
qualifications would a 'volunteer' be expected to have?
Yowie
Kathy Morgan
> The removal of Google's archive of articles for a group that is now dead
> but once was the premier source of information on a topic is a bad
> thing. That archive may be the only remaining repository of important
> information.
I think they are not removing the archive of articles, but they have
made it very difficult to find them. If you search using the name of a
removed group, it says there is no such group and provides no archive of
messages. If you can find any message that was crossposted to the group
then click on the link for the removed group, you get taken to the
archive.
A couple of examples that I tried were comp.software.shareware.users and
comp.sys.mac.games.announce. Both are groups I used to moderate that
have been removed from the list, and if you search Google Groups using
those group names you come up empty handed. If you search on the
incomplete names comp.sys.mac.games or comp.software.shareware, you find
messages crossposted into other groups and a link for the group you
want.
--
Kathy
Steve Bonine
Wow.
Thank you for sharing this information. Removing a group effectively
removes the archive. If someone who doesn't know this obscure trick is
looking for information in the archives of a newsgroup that has been
removed, they're not going to find it.
One of the strengths of Usenet is the wealth of information that has
been posted in newsgroups. If removing now-obsolete newsgroups from the
list means that this information is no longer available to people who
want it, this colors my opinion on the advisability of doing it.
Doug Freyburger
>
>
> Well, with moderated groups I have to wait for a response to my probe
> message. I can expect five different things:
> a) a bounce mail
> b) an automatic message from moderation system
> c) a message from the moderators saying that they want to keep the group
> d) a message from the moderators saying that they resign
> e) nothing
>
> Upon a) I start an MVI, the rationale being the error extracted from
> the bounce. Upon b) and c) I just take a note that the group is off
> limits.
Why off limits in the case of b) an automatic message from the
moderation system? Have there been any cases where the moderators set
the group to reject all submissions? That's the equivalent of them
wanting the group deleted. An automated message from the -admin address
is a sign that the moderation team is missing so I think it should
trigger an MVI.
Alexander Bartolich
> [...]
> Thank you for sharing this information. Removing a group effectively
> removes the archive. If someone who doesn't know this obscure trick is
> looking for information in the archives of a newsgroup that has been
> removed, they're not going to find it.
>
> One of the strengths of Usenet is the wealth of information that has
> been posted in newsgroups. If removing now-obsolete newsgroups from the
> list means that this information is no longer available to people who
> want it, this colors my opinion on the advisability of doing it.
The Classical Greeks were not influenced by the Classical Greeks. It
was the other way round. The became classical because they broke with
the ways of their fathers, strove for innovation, and achieved unprec-
edented greatness. Usenet once was the same.
The question you should ask is not how to best cope with an increasingly
broken infrastructure, but why the people providing this infrastructure
care less and less. Just yesterday you complained that today's Usenet is
great for obscure and/or obsolete computer software, but nothing else.
Today you make the preservation of this obscurity a top priority.
Ciao
Alexander.
Alexander Bartolich
> [...]
> Why off limits in the case of b) an automatic message from the
> moderation system?
The primary reason to remove dead moderated groups is this:
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:mvi
# [...] If the moderation is not working this means that all regular
# posts submitted to the group just vanish into nirvana. This is
# extremely frustrating to users.
Admittedly an automatic rejection notice also counts as frustration.
But that can be just a case of "works as intended". Here is the reply
I received for my probe post to comp.sources.games:
# The subject header of all posts must contain a special tag of the form
# "[TOPIC]", at the start of the line (but after any optional "Re:").
# Some examples of this might be:
#
# Subject: [FAQ] How do I pick the right subject tag?
# Subject: [EVENT] Party at my place!
#
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Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
> Steve Bonine wrote:
>> [...]
>> Thank you for sharing this information. Removing a group effectively
>> removes the archive. If someone who doesn't know this obscure trick is
>> looking for information in the archives of a newsgroup that has been
>> removed, they're not going to find it.
>>
>> One of the strengths of Usenet is the wealth of information that has
>> been posted in newsgroups. If removing now-obsolete newsgroups from the
>> list means that this information is no longer available to people who
>> want it, this colors my opinion on the advisability of doing it.
>
> The Classical Greeks were not influenced by the Classical Greeks. It
> was the other way round. The became classical because they broke with
> the ways of their fathers, strove for innovation, and achieved unprec-
> edented greatness. Usenet once was the same.
And it's exactly this history that I'm trying to save. At one point,
Usenet was the Classical Greece of software development. If removing a
newsgroup from the canonical list means that today's developer can't
view the software equivalent of the Acropolis, maybe we shouldn't do that.
> Just yesterday you complained that today's Usenet is
> great for obscure and/or obsolete computer software, but nothing else.
> Today you make the preservation of this obscurity a top priority.
Are you suggesting that I'm being inconsistent? This "obscurity" is a
significant asset of Usenet. In many cases, Usenet is the only source
for the information. I believe that it should be preserved, and I
assign that a higher importance than cleaning up the canonical list of
newsgroups.
Alexander Bartolich
> Alexander Bartolich wrote:
>> [...]
>> was the other way round. The became classical because they broke with
>> the ways of their fathers, strove for innovation, and achieved unprec-
>> edented greatness. Usenet once was the same.
>
> And it's exactly this history that I'm trying to save.
In that case you should build an archive. Seriously. Don't rely on the
eternal generosity of a publicly traded company. Take your fate into
your own hands. Don't practice Voodoo rituals that might or might not
influence the inner workings of said company.
> At one point,
> Usenet was the Classical Greece of software development. If removing a
> newsgroup from the canonical list means that today's developer can't
> view the software equivalent of the Acropolis, maybe we shouldn't do that.
Perhaps Google ascribes less value to dormant groups. Perhaps they just
screwed up again. Perhaps they will fix their archive any moment now.
Perhaps only inertia keeps Google Groups going, as its owner stopped to
care about Usenet a long time ago.
Ciao
Alexander.
Adam H. Kerman
>Steve Bonine wrote:
'Splain, Luthy.
You're a News administrator. Why do News administrators refuse to read
newgroup messages? Andrew refused to read 'em, yet Supernews was widely
praised for providing fine customer service with regard to how it chose
to present Usenet to subscribers.
It's this refusal that created the monster: The proponent who believes in
nothing beyond minimal effort, newgroup messages with meaningless or empty
charters, no descriptions, and total fabrications for justifications if
they bother to provide one. It's a very old phenomenon on Usenet for which
I blame News administrators.
But News administrators didn't fall down on the job, it was News
administrators, if I understand your tautology.
Damn you for making Steve Bonine sound like the more rational party here,
or whatever the appropriate Hellenic epithet would have been.
Adam H. Kerman
>Doug Freyburger wrote:
>>Why off limits in the case of b) an automatic message from the
>>moderation system?
>The primary reason to remove dead moderated groups is this:
>http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:mvi
># [...] If the moderation is not working this means that all regular
># posts submitted to the group just vanish into nirvana. This is
># extremely frustrating to users.
Seriously? You support Marty's, er, technical explanation? "Nirvana"
doesn't even make any sense.
Steve Bonine
> Steve Bonine wrote:
>> Alexander Bartolich wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> The Classical Greeks were not influenced by the Classical Greeks. It
>>> was the other way round. The became classical because they broke with
>>> the ways of their fathers, strove for innovation, and achieved unprec-
>>> edented greatness. Usenet once was the same.
>>
>> And it's exactly this history that I'm trying to save.
>
> In that case you should build an archive. Seriously. Don't rely on the
> eternal generosity of a publicly traded company. Take your fate into
> your own hands. Don't practice Voodoo rituals that might or might not
> influence the inner workings of said company.
I am under no illusion that the Google archive will always be available.
But I am also under no illusion that I could build my own archive.
>> At one point,
>> Usenet was the Classical Greece of software development. If removing a
>> newsgroup from the canonical list means that today's developer can't
>> view the software equivalent of the Acropolis, maybe we shouldn't do that.
>
> Perhaps Google ascribes less value to dormant groups. Perhaps they just
> screwed up again. Perhaps they will fix their archive any moment now.
> Perhaps only inertia keeps Google Groups going, as its owner stopped to
> care about Usenet a long time ago.
I agree. But they're all we have.
Alexander Bartolich
> Alexander Bartolich wrote:
>> [...]
>> eternal generosity of a publicly traded company. Take your fate into
>> your own hands. Don't practice Voodoo rituals that might or might not
>> influence the inner workings of said company.
>
> I am under no illusion that the Google archive will always be available.
> But I am also under no illusion that I could build my own archive.
[ Google works in mysterious ways ]
> I agree. But they're all we have.
We are slowly but steadily reaching the state of matters before the
beginning of eternal september in 1993. An amazing number of people
considers this to be a good thing. However, there is a catch. Deja
News started operations not until 1995. I say that it is just a matter
of time until we lose Google Groups. And again, an amazing number of
people considers this a good thing.
Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
> We are slowly but steadily reaching the state of matters before the
> beginning of eternal september in 1993. An amazing number of people
> considers this to be a good thing. However, there is a catch. Deja
> News started operations not until 1995. I say that it is just a matter
> of time until we lose Google Groups. And again, an amazing number of
> people considers this a good thing.
As I think I have already said in this thread, it seems that Usenet will
come full circle.
In the beginning it was the exclusive territory of a tiny subset of the
population who had access because they were associated with a university
or a defense contractor. The vast majority of these folks were computer
geeks. That's not to say that they didn't have other interests and
participate in non-computer-related newsgroups, but the population was
predominately technical/engineering.
Then along came Eternal September, and the population of Usenet swelled
for a while. But when the web became synonymous with the Internet, new
users stopped coming.
Yes, it's probably just a matter of time before we lose Google Groups as
they relate to Usenet. That will have a big effect. Whether that's a
good thing, a bad thing, or both, depends on your outlook. I'll go with
"both".
I have been a Usenet addict since about 1990. I think it's time to
stop. Several things attracted me to Usenet, but they're all waning and
now I question my time commitment. I get little useful information from
groups that should be providing non-computer-related discussion; they've
pretty much dried up and there are better ways to get that information.
I don't run a news server any more, so that satisfaction is gone. And
the rewards related to helping with administration of the big-8 have
almost disappeared since most of the tasks related to managing the
hierarchy have declined to the vanishing point. Yet I find myself
sinking time into things like this "discussion" of whether dead
newsgroups should be removed from a list of newsgroups that has meaning
to perhaps a hundred people in the universe, if that.
I admire your dedication Alexander, but I find myself on a guilt trip
because I continue to spend time here but have nothing to show for it.
I hope that your efforts provide you with the personal satisfaction that
you need to justify them, but I think I'm done.
Doug Freyburger
>
> We are slowly but steadily reaching the state of matters before the
> beginning of eternal september in 1993. An amazing number of people
> considers this to be a good thing.
I find it surprising that so many find it a good thing - Before 1993 it
was very common for trolls to get their access pulled for trolling and
as a result have an extremely hard time with their college courses.
Cause and effect that also recalls "If you aren't willing to do the
time, don't do the crime".
Should the pre-1993 state return might not the great experiment in free
speech return to the state that abusing free speech gets you removed
from the experiment? I certainly preferred it like that in the 1980s
when I had to have a job in the space program to have on line access
to UseNet and I could lose it for abusing it. I would equally like it
that way again. With a lower population might it happen? There are a
lot of posters who UseNet would be better without. My kill file has
quite a number of them, though I am vigorous about author kill so it
also includes plenty who are well below the threshold I'd use to TOS
accounts if I ran my own server.
> However, there is a catch. Deja
> News started operations not until 1995. I say that it is just a matter
> of time until we lose Google Groups. And again, an amazing number of
> people considers this a good thing.
Before 1995 there were FAQ files and regulars maintained them. After
1995 there was searching in the archives and FAQ maintenance languished.
I have long considered UseNet FAQ files to be better summaries of topics
than is available in any textbook I've ever found. The depth of
expertese is amazing.
If the archives are lost, and some day Google may well drop them, it is
possible to return to the ERA of FAQ maintenance.
I have no illusions that as traffic continues to fall either of these
benefits happen. I've long viewed trolls as waging a war of attrition
on UseNet so I do not believe those benefits will return.
Alexander Bartolich
> Alexander Bartolich wrote:
>> [...]
>> attrition. Closing a group dominated by kooks will not get rid of the
>> kooks. It will just drive them to another group. Having the board
>> decide on religious questions (like "What is true Quakerism?") will
>> not solve those questions. It will just make the board itself object
>> of a reli- gious conflict.
>
> To me, the better question would be 'What would constitute reasonable
> content?'.
The advantage of an objective guideline is that it's not dependent on
the persons involved. Anybody can apply the guideline and will always
get the same result.
Subjective assessment of content, however, has meaning only with a
certain target audience in mind. To answer the question "What is true
Quakerism?" one only has to know absolute truth. On the other hand
telepathic powers are required to give the general answer to "What would
users of soc.religion.quaker like to read?".
As far as I know, there are only three approaches to the problem:
a) Offer a variety; let the target group choose; eventually close down
the rejected options. This is how a market economy works, but also
the way that Google selects winners from the abundance of blogs and
boards.
b) Give users the ability to directly control content by having them
rate comments, threads or stories. This is used on most of the large
boards (e.g. slashdot.org) but is no guarantee for success (e.g.
kuro5hin.org failed miserably).
c) Select representatives to speak for the users.
Unfortunately only the last option is available on contemporary Usenet.
So, to me, the better question is "Who is to say what constitutes rea-
sonable content?".
> [...]
> Yes, I realise it would be alot of work going through such groups and making
> a value judgement on whether the contents of the group could be considered
> relevant to the name of the group. But on the same token a large number of
> high traffic, no content newsgroups are a mammoth waste of bandwidth and
> serve as an excellent example of why ISPs should drop Usenet.
The bandwith required by text-only Usenet is negligible and can be han-
dled by any desktop PC. To an ISP, the cost of providing text-only Usenet
is dominated by the salary of administrators. The damage inflicted by
broken groups lies not in wasted computing power but in the frustration
caused to users.
Dropping high traffic groups is indeed a solution to bandwidth problems.
It is very unlikely to be a salvation for frustrated regulars, though.
Trolls and Kooks will just move on to the next group.
>> [...]
>> (At this point the audience, sensing a commencing call for volunteers,
>> rapidly leaves the premises.)
>
> Volunteers for what? For determining which groups in the Big 8 are
> 'abandoned' or 'dead'?
In a nutshell, yes. However, there is a catch. Besides pure traffic num-
bers we have no working definition of "dead". For the groups you have in
mind I really see only two approaches:
a) We set up such an objective definition
b) You convince the B8MB that you are a trustworthy authority than can
be trusted blindly
c) You come up with something completely else
> How much time would this take up per week, and what qualifications
> would a 'volunteer' be expected to have?
Hard to say. This is a job that does not yet exist.
Ciao
Alexander.
Steve Bonine
it represents the work of countless people over several decades in the
administration of the big-8. I think that's why I find it difficult to
just let go of the issue that it has become a list of newsgroups that
passed their vote for creation, rather than a document useful for
identifying where to post.
This Google issue threw me for a loop. I did some research today, and
discovered that the _information_ in removed newsgroups is still
accessible via Google's search. It is only when you search for the name
of the _newsgroup_ that you come up empty handed.
I still believe that removing newsgroups in the traditional way -- one
group per RFD or at most a hierarchy reorg per RFD -- is not a
justifiable investment of time for today's Usenet. But if the
investment could be substantially reduced . . .
Alexander Bartolich wrote:
> Yowie wrote:
>> Volunteers for what? For determining which groups in the Big 8 are
>> 'abandoned' or 'dead'?
>
> In a nutshell, yes. However, there is a catch. Besides pure traffic num-
> bers we have no working definition of "dead". For the groups you have in
> mind I really see only two approaches:
> a) We set up such an objective definition
> b) You convince the B8MB that you are a trustworthy authority than can
> be trusted blindly
> c) You come up with something completely else
"Something else" has been discussed on and off for years. It's some
variant of (1) rank groups by raw traffic (2) propose deletion of some
number of the least active (3) evaluate feedback on ones that should be
retained (4) remove the ones that have no legitimate supporters. If you
did this in groups of 50 or even 100 it would still take at least a year
to reduce the current list to something approximating a list of active
newsgroups.
It's my understanding that the board is adamantly opposed to anything
along these lines. That's equivalent to saying that there will not be
any substantive revision of the list. OK, it's a risk/reward
cost/benefit analysis. If the risk isn't worth the reward and/or the
cost isn't worth the benefit, so be it. But maybe . . . just maybe . .
. the environment has changed enough in the last two years that it's now
possible to do a mass deletion of low-traffic newsgroups.
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
>"Something else" has been discussed on and off for years. It's some
>variant of (1) rank groups by raw traffic (2) propose deletion of some
>number of the least active (3) evaluate feedback on ones that should be
>retained (4) remove the ones that have no legitimate supporters. If you
>did this in groups of 50 or even 100 it would still take at least a year
>to reduce the current list to something approximating a list of active
>newsgroups.
>It's my understanding that the board is adamantly opposed to anything
>along these lines. ...
The board approved Jim Riley's plan.
http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=nan:2007-10-02-low-traffic-result
But Jim dropped out of the scene shortly afterward and
no one took his place in the driver's seat for group
removal.
This is different from being "adamantly opposed." I'd say it's
something like "not passionate about" group removal (until
the Angel of Death joined the board, at any rate).
Marty
--
Co-chair of the Big-8 Management Board (B8MB) <http://www.big-8.org>
Unless otherwise indicated, I speak for myself, not for the Board.
Kathy Morgan
[removal of dead/very low traffic groups]
> "Something else" has been discussed on and off for years. It's some
> variant of (1) rank groups by raw traffic (2) propose deletion of some
> number of the least active (3) evaluate feedback on ones that should be
> retained (4) remove the ones that have no legitimate supporters. If you
> did this in groups of 50 or even 100 it would still take at least a year
> to reduce the current list to something approximating a list of active
> newsgroups.
>
> It's my understanding that the board is adamantly opposed to anything
> along these lines. That's equivalent to saying that there will not be
> any substantive revision of the list.
That's not my perception at all. We have a policy in place for removal
of dead or extremely low traffic unmoderated groups [1] and we made an
abortive attempt a little over two years ago to start on the process. I
believe the problem is mainly one of unpaid volunteers finding the time
and will to follow through on the process.
I can only speak for myself on this, but I suspect my experience
probably is similar to that of all the other B8MB members who were
working on the project. I selected about 2 dozen groups listed by Jim
Riley as very low traffic and sent pings to the groups. In most groups,
there were one or two people monitoring the group who responded. In some
cases they felt it would be appropriate to remove the group; some wanted
the group to be kept.
The next step would have been to post removal RFD's and see what the
response was, followed by either a vote on whether to remove or possibly
the withdrawal of the RFD depending on that response. I got busy IRL
and enough time passed before I could get back to it that I felt it
would be most appropriate to start all over--and I just haven't had the
will to do that.
Many of the other Board members also selected dead/low traffic groups to
ping and have not reported back to the rest of the Board. I suspect
their stories probably are close to identical to mine.
It has now been 2 1/2 years since the posting of low traffic groups
list, Jim Riley and Peter J Ross have both stopped posting (they were
the two volunteers monitoring group activities), and I have been
reluctant to remind Board members that we should be posting a call for a
listing of low traffic groups because I know I won't have time for some
months to do anything with it.
> But maybe . . . just maybe . . . the environment has changed enough in the
> last two years that it's now possible to do a mass deletion of low-traffic
> newsgroups.
Doing a mass deletion would significantly reduce the workload, and I
think it is something we should consider.
[1] The RESULT posting for the policy RFD is available on Google at
<http://groups.google.com/group/news.announce.newgroups/browse_frm/threa
d/a848e125e3c73dd6/5310f072cd5b42dd?q=removing+extremely-low-traffic>.
If my newsreader has broken the link, just search at
<http://groups.google.com> for "removing extremely-low-traffic".
--
Kathy, member of B8MB, speaking only for myself
Yowie
*snippity*
> In a nutshell, yes. However, there is a catch. Besides pure traffic
> num- bers we have no working definition of "dead". For the groups you
> have in mind I really see only two approaches:
> a) We set up such an objective definition
> b) You convince the B8MB that you are a trustworthy authority than can
> be trusted blindly
> c) You come up with something completely else
In my ignorant naivety, how about :
d) 'just ask'.
No answer means there's no-one there who suffeciently cares about the group
to answer - kill it.
An answer of 'yeah, this group is dead' and no other sort of response is
enough for it to be dead - kill it.
At least one answer of 'this group isn't dead, don't delete it' is probably
enough to save it, at least in a first round culling.
That of course entirely fails to address who's going to volunteer to do the
asking, though.
Yowie