news.announce.newgroups is up

[Greg Woods]

The new moderated newsgroup news.announce.newgroups is up and ready. All
new newsgroup proposals, calls for votes, and results of votes should be
posted to this group. It is hoped that ALL such postings will go to this group,
so that one only need read the moderated group to know what new newsgroup
proposals are before the net and what their status is. To that end the
newsgroup creation guidelines have been changed to state that these postings
should go in the moderated group rather than news.groups. Followup discussions
will continue to take place in news.groups. The moderated group will contain
ONLY new group proposals, calls for votes, and results of votes, and periodic
postings of the newsgroup creation guidelines. Proposals for changes to the
newsgroup creation procedure will also be considered, again with the discussion
and inevitable flame wars taking place only in news.groups, provided that these
proposals do not become too numerous (bearing in mind that the major goal of
this new group is to keep the volume low).
Articles will only be rejected for two reasons: 1) They do not meet the
newsgroup's charter (which includes followups to previous articles; the charter
specifically prohibits this); and 2) They appear to be accidental violations
of the newsgroup creation guidelines. Articles which state that the poster
is aware of the guidelines violation will be posted provided that they are
within the charter of the group. In any case, any article rejected for reason
#2 above will be posted anyway if the poster insists upon it after being
informed of the violation.
I know that it will take a while before everyone becomes aware of the new
group, so for the first two months (which allows some overlap time for students
who have been off the net for the summer) I will take appropriate postings out
of news.groups and post them to news.announce.newgroups (although I can't
promise that I will notice every such article even though I will be looking
for them; there are a LOT of articles in news.groups, which is the main reason
for having the moderated group in the first place).
Most news software allows posting to moderated groups by any user, with
the article getting mailed to the moderator. If this doesn't work on your site
for some reason, and you can't get it fixed, you can mail submissions directly
to news-announ...@ncar.ucar.edu

--Greg