RESULT: comp.lang.prograph will be removed.
Vito Kuhn
remove comp.lang.prograph
The Big-8 Management Board has decided by consensus to remove the
newsgroup comp.lang.prograph. Voting began on 17 Jun 2006, and ended on
18 Jun 2006.
This group will be removed on 20 Jun 2006.
RATIONALE: comp.lang.prograph
This newsgroup hasn't seen any significant traffic in years. In the past
12 months alone, the group didn't even see ONE on-topic post.
Scan results from http://netscan.research.microsoft.com :
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q46B1592D
It's clear that comp.lang.prograph is an ideal candidate for removal.
EXISTING CHARTER: comp.lang.prograph
Any and all discussion about Prograph, a unique visual object-oriented
dataflow programming language.
What is Prograph?: Prograph is a complete programming language and
environment that uses visual elements to describe objects and
functions -- there is no textual syntax -- and it has its own
interpreter and compiler. After over five years of availability on
the Apple Macintosh, Prograph is moving cross-platform with versions
for Windows and several Unices currently in testing. The most recent
version of Prograph, Prograph CPX, contains a cross-platform
application framework class library and high-level GUI builder.
Prograph will also have the ability to generate C++ code which will be
compilable under gcc linked to a set of compatibility classes on a
wide variety of platforms.
What about Prograph Source Code?: Prograph source code should not be
loaded onto the usenet system, as it tends to be large. Instead,
there is a Prograph file archive maintained at ftp.iup.edu in the
info-prograph directory where files can be uploaded and downloaded via
anonymous ftp. For those without ftp access, an info-prograph-sources
mailing list can be established. alt.sources.mac also lists Prograph
code as one of its legal posting types.
END CHARTER.
NOTE: This group was originally gated to a mail list when it was created
in 1994: Info-Prograph <info-p...@grove.iup.edu>
DISTRIBUTION:
This result posting has been posted to the following newsgroups:
news.announce.newgroups
news.groups
comp.lang.prograph
PROPONENT:
Vito Kuhn <vito...@family-usenet.com>
CHANGE HISTORY:
2006-06-18 Result completed.
2006-06-06 LCC prepared.
2006-05-31 RFD prepared for posting.
2006-05-25 RFD prepared by Vito Kuhn.
David DiNucci
> RESULT
> remove comp.lang.prograph
>
> The Big-8 Management Board has decided by consensus to remove the
> newsgroup comp.lang.prograph. Voting began on 17 Jun 2006, and ended on
> 18 Jun 2006.
>
> This group will be removed on 20 Jun 2006.
Hmm, on the 12th, I see a message on c.l.p that voting will begin in 5
days and last up to 7 days (and even that message was not labeled as a
"CFV", so I didn't notice this announcement), then on the 18th I get a
message that voting ended in one day.
Early on, I tried to follow the discussion on news.groups. I was
eventually disgusted with the huge waste of time there, and
unsubscribed. Apparently, the only way to try to do anything about big
8 is to waste huge gobs of time filtering through all the garbage on
news.groups. I now doubt that there's a pony in there somewhere.
The use of namespace was hurting nobody. The group still had the
potential of being used. I get the feeling that those voting against it
feel that little-used groups are an affront to the effectiveness of big
8 management. They are only if the aim is to make all newsgroups
constantly popular. The solution is not to delete groups, but to change
this goal, to create more newsgroups that will ebb and flow in
usefullness, to make the whole big 8 system a more useful and attractive
whole rather than islands of individual newsgroups for the current most
popular topics.
As I mentioned in an earlier note on news.groups, the big 8 namespace is
the most valueable and least expensive part of the big 8. It's silly to
shrink it needlessly.
My two cents, apparently the last down the drain.
-Dave
David DiNucci
> Early on, I tried to follow the discussion on news.groups. I was
> eventually disgusted with the huge waste of time there, and
> unsubscribed. Apparently, the only way to try to do anything about big
> 8 is to waste huge gobs of time filtering through all the garbage on
> news.groups. I now doubt that there's a pony in there somewhere.
Just to see if comp.lang.prograph has even been mentioned in news.groups
during the week or two that I've been unsubscribed, I just tried to
resubscribe. I was told that there are 78,622 new messages. I aborted
the subscription.
news.groups is the home of the big 8 management team. We are not only
supposed to interact with them through this garbage, we are supposed to
ignore the fact that their own home/group is a dump, yet they're
responsible for managing everyone else's home/group. I think there's
some parable that applies.
-Dave
Jim Riley
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:43:28 -0700, David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com> wrote:
>Vito Kuhn wrote:
>> RESULT
>> remove comp.lang.prograph
>>
>> The Big-8 Management Board has decided by consensus to remove the
>> newsgroup comp.lang.prograph. Voting began on 17 Jun 2006, and ended on
>> 18 Jun 2006.
>>
>> This group will be removed on 20 Jun 2006.
>
>Hmm, on the 12th, I see a message on c.l.p that voting will begin in 5
>days and last up to 7 days (and even that message was not labeled as a
>"CFV", so I didn't notice this announcement), then on the 18th I get a
>message that voting ended in one day.
The voting was done by the Big 8 Management Board (B8MB). The 5 day period was
a last chance for comments from the general public that they might wish to
consider before voting.
The 7 days is a maximum limit during which members of the B8MB may vote.
Personally, I would leave that part out, since it is a matter of internal
procedure by the B8MB.
>The use of namespace was hurting nobody. The group still had the
>potential of being used. I get the feeling that those voting against it
>feel that little-used groups are an affront to the effectiveness of big
>8 management.
s/little-used/unused/
> They are only if the aim is to make all newsgroups
>constantly popular. The solution is not to delete groups, but to change
>this goal, to create more newsgroups that will ebb and flow in
>usefullness, to make the whole big 8 system a more useful and attractive
>whole rather than islands of individual newsgroups for the current most
>popular topics.
For a quite liberal definition of "constantly popular".
>As I mentioned in an earlier note on news.groups, the big 8 namespace is
>the most valueable and least expensive part of the big 8. It's silly to
>shrink it needlessly.
--
Jim Riley
Jim Riley
>David DiNucci wrote:
>> Early on, I tried to follow the discussion on news.groups. I was
>> eventually disgusted with the huge waste of time there, and
>> unsubscribed. Apparently, the only way to try to do anything about big
>> 8 is to waste huge gobs of time filtering through all the garbage on
>> news.groups. I now doubt that there's a pony in there somewhere.
>
>Just to see if comp.lang.prograph has even been mentioned in news.groups
>during the week or two that I've been unsubscribed, I just tried to
>resubscribe. I was told that there are 78,622 new messages. I aborted
>the subscription.
This is likely an artifact of your newsreader and the fact that your news
provider keeps a couple of years of messages. When you subscribe, it may try to
retrieve all headers that have been posted to the newsgroup.
In Agent, you can either request that articles posted after a certain date be
retrieved, or the last N articles. If you specify a date, the newsreader must
still retrieve all headers before it can discard the older ones. When you
specify the last N articles,
>news.groups is the home of the big 8 management team. We are not only
>supposed to interact with them through this garbage, we are supposed to
>ignore the fact that their own home/group is a dump, yet they're
>responsible for managing everyone else's home/group. I think there's
>some parable that applies.
--
Jim Riley
David DiNucci
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:17:45 -0700, David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com> wrote:
>>David DiNucci wrote:
>>Just to see if comp.lang.prograph has even been mentioned in news.groups
>>during the week or two that I've been unsubscribed, I just tried to
>>resubscribe. I was told that there are 78,622 new messages. I aborted
>>the subscription.
>
>
> This is likely an artifact of your newsreader and the fact that your news
> provider keeps a couple of years of messages. When you subscribe, it may try to
> retrieve all headers that have been posted to the newsgroup.
So, for kicks, I did subscribe and counted the postings. At least 4326
postings in the last 14 days, so about 300/day. If posts/day is being
used as a metric of group quality, news.groups is way up there, whether
it's useful or not. I've certainly got better things to do with my time
than wade through them.
Speaking of which, I've already decided what I would do with my time if
I wanted to make usenet useful again. First, I'd create/upgrade clients
to be more selective regarding "crossposts"--e.g. to allow the
definition of different article classes, each such class being defined
(effectively) by a Venn diagram of the groups that it has and has not
been crossposted to. Second, I'd create a new hierarchy, one with a
very stable hierarchy consisting of lots of "groups" spanning a wide
range of topics. Crossposting would be welcomed, rather than
admonished. This would put all the control back in the hands of the
users, rather than some centralized committee. Users could continue to
use the groups as they do now, but could also key their articles in any
number of ways by crossposting to different group (keyword)
combinations, and defining their desired article classes to select only
those. It would be easy for any particular collection of people to
select rather unique combinations to make it easy to find their threads,
but at the same time, others could find the threads by being less
selective in the group (keyword) combinations that they want to find.
This current big 8 notion that some centralized group should figure out
what categories people should be allowed to post in at any one time is
ridiculous, but I have no intent to argue the matter in news.groups.
Big 8 cannot be changed to fit this new mold, and I've wasted tens to
hundreds of hours already wading through that stuff anyway.
So, you guys have fun,
-Dave
James Farrar
wrote:
>This current big 8 notion that some centralized group should figure out
>what categories people should be allowed to post in at any one time is
>ridiculous, but I have no intent to argue the matter in news.groups.
What notion?
--
James Farrar
. @gmail.com
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
<VE1mg.8879$o4....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>:
> ... The 7 days is a maximum limit during which members of the B8MB may vote.
>Personally, I would leave that part out, since it is a matter of internal
>procedure by the B8MB.
Some folks want to know about our internal procedures.
Proponents want to have some idea how long the decision will take.
You are correct, of course, that the boilerplate could be written
differently.
Marty
--
Member of the Big-8 Management Board (B8MB), such as it is.
The B8MB is a work in progress.
See http://www.big-8.org for more information.
David DiNucci
The notion that you've just posted to a group that no longer exists (at
least officially) due to actions of some central committee. In fact,
there's no unmoderated group right now for discussing visual languages
(in general). At one time, the users found comp.lang.prograph a
suitable stand-in for comp.lang.visual when that was overrun with
off-topic posts and subsequently became moderated. Of course, in the
big 8 system, the new posts to comp.lang.prograph would be considered
off-posts. Events such as that debacle have led many to give up on
usenet as a productive place to exchange ideas (I would say with good
reason). The scheme I mentioned could have avoided the whole
situation--e.g. if a bunch of off-posters for microsoft visual basic
invade a group like comp.lang.visual, either convince them to also
crosspost to some "basic" or "microsoft" group (which is for their own
good as well, for those who will find them that way, as for those who
don't want to see them), or suggest that those who don't want to see the
ms vb articles crosspost their more general visual language articles to
some other descriptive group (e.g. some design group) as well as
comp.lang.visual. Either way establishes the basis for users to create
article classes that include or exclude the posts that they are or
aren't interested in.
The bottom line is that the users could do much more to work out
conflicts without involving a centralized committee than is possible in
the big 8, especially as long as the big 8 is deleting little-used
groups, admonishing cross-posters, and promoting a belief that groups
can be made more useful by instituting or modifying procedures required
for their creation. Groups can only be made useful by users using them
usefully, and my proposed approach allows that by effectively
multiplying the number of available groups exponentially via article
classes.
Once again, I am not in any way proposing changing the big 8 system, and
am crossposting this to news.groups only because someone before me in
this thread apparently felt it important, but I do find all of the venom
exchanged in news.groups to be indicative of power struggles. I recall
how I felt during as the proponent of comp.distributed. I just believe
that all that "power" would best be left in the hands of the users.
-Dave
Tim Skirvin
> At one time, the users found comp.lang.prograph a suitable stand-in
> for comp.lang.visual when that was overrun with off-topic posts and
> subsequently became moderated.
Would you like to propose comp.lang.visual-progrmaming, or
something something similar?
> Groups can only be made useful by users using them usefully, and my
> proposed approach allows that by effectively multiplying the number of
> available groups exponentially via article classes.
Okay, how do you want to implement it?
- Tim Skirvin (sk...@big-8.org)
Chair, Big-8 Management Board
--
http://www.big-8.org/ Big-8 Management Board
http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/ Skirv's Homepage <FISH>< <*>
David DiNucci
> David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com> writes:
>
>
>>At one time, the users found comp.lang.prograph a suitable stand-in
>>for comp.lang.visual when that was overrun with off-topic posts and
>>subsequently became moderated.
>
>
> Would you like to propose comp.lang.visual-progrmaming, or
> something something similar?
I am not proposing anything in the big 8 at this time, nor am I likely
to do so in the future.
>>Groups can only be made useful by users using them usefully, and my
>>proposed approach allows that by effectively multiplying the number of
>>available groups exponentially via article classes.
>
>
> Okay, how do you want to implement it?
If I was doing it, I'd modify or create a browser which had the
capability for each user to define personalized article classes (maybe
newsgroup classes would be a better name) consisting of newsgroup names
connected with ANDs, ORs, NOTs, and (if desired) parens, symbolizing the
groups that a post would need to be crossposted to to qualify for the
class. When displaying the articles in a class, each article header
could optionally be displayed with an indication of precisely which
groups it was (cross)posted to.
That's all I'm suggesting. Instead of subscribing to a list of groups,
one would create a list of article classes. I think the basic usenet
infrastructure could exist untouched, except there may be a "hardwired"
limit on crossposting right now that could be troublesome. Down the
line, it's possible that an extended news transfer protocol could
optimize article fetch, but for now, articles excluded based on ANDs and
NOTs in the class definitions could all be dropped at the client end.
Again, I don't think this could ever be implemented within the big 8
hierarchy due to history, priorities, and customs there.
-Dave
Tim Skirvin
>>> At one time, the users found comp.lang.prograph a suitable stand-in
>>> for comp.lang.visual when that was overrun with off-topic posts and
>>> subsequently became moderated.
>> Would you like to propose comp.lang.visual-progrmaming, or
>> something something similar?
> I am not proposing anything in the big 8 at this time, nor am I likely
> to do so in the future.
Okay. I think this is the easiest path to get what you want,
though.
>>> Groups can only be made useful by users using them usefully, and my
>>> proposed approach allows that by effectively multiplying the number of
>>> available groups exponentially via article classes.
>> Okay, how do you want to implement it?
> If I was doing it, I'd modify or create a browser which had the
> capability for each user to define personalized article classes (maybe
> newsgroup classes would be a better name) consisting of newsgroup names
> connected with ANDs, ORs, NOTs, and (if desired) parens, symbolizing the
> groups that a post would need to be crossposted to to qualify for the
> class. When displaying the articles in a class, each article header
> could optionally be displayed with an indication of precisely which
> groups it was (cross)posted to.
So... you want to have a keywords function that's searchable in a
boolean way by the browser? You'll probably have to make both server and
client changes for that.
> Again, I don't think this could ever be implemented within the big 8
> hierarchy due to history, priorities, and customs there.
*shrug* Implement it with just plain NNTP, and it'd probably be
useful. Until there's working code, I'm not sure I'm in a good place to
comment.
David DiNucci
> David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com> writes:
>>If I was doing it, I'd modify or create a browser which had the
>>capability for each user to define personalized article classes (maybe
>>newsgroup classes would be a better name) consisting of newsgroup names
>>connected with ANDs, ORs, NOTs, and (if desired) parens, symbolizing the
>>groups that a post would need to be crossposted to to qualify for the
>>class. When displaying the articles in a class, each article header
>>could optionally be displayed with an indication of precisely which
>>groups it was (cross)posted to.
>
>
> So... you want to have a keywords function that's searchable in a
> boolean way by the browser? You'll probably have to make both server and
> client changes for that.
I do not propose a keywords function, nor server changes. If I
understand them, keywords typically work within groups. I am talking
about across/between groups. The newsgroup names would effectively
become this new sort of keywords. The server would not even need to be
aware of the change. If the article class at the client end was
expressed in (or converted to) disjunctive normal form, the client could
just fetch one group mentioned in each disjunct from the server and the
extras (excluded by conjuncts within the disjunct) could be pared away
at the client.
>>Again, I don't think this could ever be implemented within the big 8
>>hierarchy due to history, priorities, and customs there.
>
>
> *shrug* Implement it with just plain NNTP, and it'd probably be
> useful. Until there's working code, I'm not sure I'm in a good place to
> comment.
I am just responding to your questions at this time. I prefaced it all
with "if I wanted to spend the time", etc. Right now, that's not an
option for me.
Nobody knows how well it would work, including me, but for someone out
there up on implementing news clients, it might be something fun to fool
around with.
-Dave
David DiNucci
> so if someone wanted to discuss astronomy > telescopes > imaging they
> wouldn't see astronomy> telescopes > making but if someone wanted
> astronomy > telescopes they would see articles in both "classes"?
Yes, in principle. The current hierarchical namespace structure used by
big 8 is used to refine some topic down to the specificity which someone
(or some group) believes is both broad enough and precise enough to
contain entire useful conversations. In what I'm proposing, topics
under topics would often be replaced by just a list of individual topics
separated by ANDs, so (similar to what you wrote) the class "astronomy
AND telescopes" would end up being a superset of "astronomy AND
telescopes AND imaging", for example. However, if one was to build a
new hierarchy to accomodate this new approach, I doubt that the topics
(groups) would just be individual words. I expect the hierarchy in the
naming structure (a.b.c) would primarily serve to make it easier to find
the topics to build your classes from. Realistically, then, I might
expect a class for telescopic imaging to look something like
"astronomy.telescopes AND photography.imaging" or some such. I'm not
devoting much time now to devising the basis for the hierarchy. The
real goal is for there to be enough general topics from which users
could build useful classes, but also not so many different ways to
describe the same class that conversations could get lost in the mix.
>
>
>>This current big 8 notion that some centralized group should figure out
>>what categories people should be allowed to post in at any one time is
>>ridiculous, but I have no intent to argue the matter in news.groups.
>>Big 8 cannot be changed to fit this new mold, and I've wasted tens to
>>hundreds of hours already wading through that stuff anyway.
>>
>>So, you guys have fun,
>
>
> Dave, you have a point... watch out Russ and Company will label you
> "destructive"...
Since I'm not proposing this as big 8, I don't know why it has anything
to do with them. Regardless, since all I've really suggested so far is
additional functionality for clients, and that functionality could also
be applied to reading existing big 8 newsgroups if that's how users want
to use it, I don't personally see the threat. But then again, I'm not
"Russ and Company".
-Dave
James Farrar
<bobof...@127.0.0.7> wrote:
>On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:55:39 +0100, in news.groups, James Farrar
><james.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:57:12 -0700, David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>This current big 8 notion that some centralized group should figure out
>>>what categories people should be allowed to post in at any one time is
>>>ridiculous, but I have no intent to argue the matter in news.groups.
>
>basic sentence diagraming. I guess you are too young to have had to
>learn it
>
>the subject is "Notion"
>
>
>>What notion?
>
>"some centralized group should figure out
>what categories people should be allowed to post in at any one time"
Well, I suppose if the hierarchical structure defines "categories
people [are] allowed to post in", then it's been the case since day
one.
David DiNucci
Yes, it has, and it is still. Some hierarchies (e.g. alt.*, free.*)
have at least tried to remove the creation of the structure from a
centralized group. I am suggesting imposing a structure of topics
(which may, in fact, be decided by a centralized group), but allowing
users to post and fetch articles based on any desired user-defined
combinations of those topics, rather than just one at a time. Users
can, in effect, create new categories/topics/groups on the fly by
"crossposting" to novel combinations of groups befitting their posts,
rather than proposing, justifying, waiting, hoping for a new newsgroup
to be created with the same logical description and then doing whatever
is necessary to convince the ISPs to carry it. (I don't know how long
that last step takes most people, but I have personal experience with it
taking many months.)
-Dave
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
<R_6dneNuXL6OeQTZ...@comcast.com>:
> ... I am suggesting imposing a structure of topics
>(which may, in fact, be decided by a centralized group), but allowing
>users to post and fetch articles based on any desired user-defined
>combinations of those topics, rather than just one at a time. Users
>can, in effect, create new categories/topics/groups on the fly by
>"crossposting" to novel combinations of groups befitting their posts,
>rather than proposing, justifying, waiting, hoping for a new newsgroup
>to be created with the same logical description and then doing whatever
>is necessary to convince the ISPs to carry it.
Well, you're a free agent; if you want to write a new newsreader
with the search and crosspost capacities you want, you may do
so at any time.
>(I don't know how long
>that last step takes most people, but I have personal experience with it
>taking many months.)
It's hard to tell what the time frame will be under the new system.
Jim Riley
>Jim Riley wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:17:45 -0700, David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com> wrote:
>>>David DiNucci wrote:
>
>>>Just to see if comp.lang.prograph has even been mentioned in news.groups
>>>during the week or two that I've been unsubscribed, I just tried to
>>>resubscribe. I was told that there are 78,622 new messages. I aborted
>>>the subscription.
>>
>> This is likely an artifact of your newsreader and the fact that your news
>> provider keeps a couple of years of messages. When you subscribe, it may try to
>> retrieve all headers that have been posted to the newsgroup.
>
>So, for kicks, I did subscribe and counted the postings. At least 4326
>postings in the last 14 days, so about 300/day. If posts/day is being
>used as a metric of group quality, news.groups is way up there, whether
>it's useful or not.
Posts/day is not being used as a metric of group quality except in certain
specific cases.
When posts/month goes below about 5 per month, discussion newsgroups begin to
lose all functionality, and it is being used as an indication of a lack of
interest in discussing the topic in the newsgroup. The RFD was intended to make
a better determination of use.
--
Jim Riley
David DiNucci
>>Posts/day is not being used as a metric of group quality except in certain
>>specific cases.
>>
>>When posts/month goes below about 5 per month, discussion newsgroups begin to
>>lose all functionality, and it is being used as an indication of a lack of
>>interest in discussing the topic in the newsgroup.
>
>
> Except, of course, for the people who made the 5 posts. So the group
> is empty most of the time. Big deal. It's there for when people want
> to use it. It's only bytes in the active file.
Playing the devil's (or at least b8mb's) advocate: Haven't you been
reading all the problems these few bytes can cause? On 6/3, Tim Skirvin
writes "the major problem with leaving unused groups around Usenet is
that it makes it harder to create new ones". You can already see how
much trouble comp.lang.prograph has created for the creation of
soc.mens.asatru (sic) or whatever. He also writes "The goal for the
user is to find *discussion*, not to find a specific newsgroup." So, if
comp.lang.prograph is gone, maybe people who might have used it would
instead bump into a discussion in that asatru group and join that. (I
think a common term for this concept is "social engineering".) On 6/2,
Russ says "Uh, I'm not seeing the value in an empty namespace entry. If
anyone wants the group, we can always recreate it." Although the first
sentence may just seem like Russ stating his unsubstantiated opinion,
the second is clearly a justification to make that opinion seem less
damaging than it might at first be construed.
So you see, those "bytes in an active file" are indeed pretty harmful.
Besides, this group (comp.lang.prograph) is already gone, so the point
(at least here) is m00t.
-Dave
Tim Skirvin
David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com> writes:
> Playing the devil's (or at least b8mb's) advocate: Haven't you been
> reading all the problems these few bytes can cause? On 6/3, Tim Skirvin
> writes "the major problem with leaving unused groups around Usenet is
> that it makes it harder to create new ones". You can already see how
> much trouble comp.lang.prograph has created for the creation of
> soc.mens.asatru (sic) or whatever.
Actually, the problem is with the vision-impaired group that's
also being discussed here. If we had a properly working removal process
that was easy to use and constantly active, I think I'd be a lot more
willing to experiment and less concerned about an up-front justification
of traffic. Concretely, this would make it easier to justify Henrietta's
proposal.
The most reasonable counter-argument that I see is that perhaps we
*shouldn't* care about traffic levels, and just have groups around for
anything that seems reasonable. I'm not willing to accept that argument
either, though...
To reiterate Russ' point - if it looks like there's going to be
usage for a prograph group, then I'd vote to re-create it.
James Farrar
<bobof...@127.0.0.7> wrote:
>On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:36:16 +0100, in news.groups, James Farrar
><james.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:53:43 -0700, Bob Officer
>><bobof...@127.0.0.7> wrote:
>>
>>>On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:55:39 +0100, in news.groups, James Farrar
>>><james.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:57:12 -0700, David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com>
>>>>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>This current big 8 notion that some centralized group should figure out
>>>>>what categories people should be allowed to post in at any one time is
>>>>>ridiculous, but I have no intent to argue the matter in news.groups.
>>>
>>>basic sentence diagraming. I guess you are too young to have had to
>>>learn it
>>>
>>>the subject is "Notion"
>>>
>>>
>>>>What notion?
>>>
>>>"some centralized group should figure out
>>>what categories people should be allowed to post in at any one time"
>>
>>Well, I suppose if the hierarchical structure defines "categories
>>people [are] allowed to post in", then it's been the case since day
>>one.
>
>Now you know what notion he was talking about, don't you.
I suspected that was what he meant, but I question the use of the word
"current", which implies that it's not always been the case with
Usenet.
David DiNucci
I meant to imply only that it might not always be so (in the future).
-Dave
Jim Riley
wrote:
>On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 06:42:57 GMT, Jim Riley <jim...@pipeline.com>
>wrote:
>Except, of course, for the people who made the 5 posts. So the group
>is empty most of the time. Big deal. It's there for when people want
>to use it. It's only bytes in the active file.
When the posts/month in a discussion newsgroup goes below about 5 per month,
threads become rare. They are for the most part single articles posted through
Google which may or may not even be topical for the newsgroup.
Please note that 5 articles/month is about two orders of magnitude above the
recent activity in comp.lang.prograph.
--
Jim Riley
John Heaney
David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com> wrote:
> The notion that you've just posted to a group that no longer exists (at
> least officially) due to actions of some central committee. In fact,
> there's no unmoderated group right now for discussing visual languages
> (in general). At one time, the users found comp.lang.prograph a
> suitable stand-in for comp.lang.visual when that was overrun with
> off-topic posts and subsequently became moderated. Of course, in the
> big 8 system, the new posts to comp.lang.prograph would be considered
> off-posts. Events such as that debacle have led many to give up on
> usenet as a productive place to exchange ideas (I would say with good
> reason).
As one of the people involved in the comp.lang.prograph newsgroup during
its entire useful lifetime, I just want to clarify a bit of the history.
The problem with comp.lang.visual was that it was flooded with posts
about non-visual languages that had "Visual" in their names (e.g.
VisualBasic). It became a de facto support group for that language. In
fact, we wanted a support group for the Prograph language. Note that it
was not comp.lang.visual.prograph. It flourished for a time, as the
Prograph language gained a user base. Unfortunately, the language went
the way of the dodo and there was no one using the language anymore to
need or provide the support of the newsgroup.
It is true that comp.lang.prograph served as a forum for general
discussions about visual languages, but Prograph was the only truly
general purpose visual language and, so, no one considered the posts to
be off topic. We were in the odd circumstance where comp.lang.visual was
synonymous with the non-visual VisualBasic and comp.lang.prograph was
synonymous with true visual languages of which Prograph was the only
example.
I suppose it is appropriate that an external body is around to delete
the group. It would be unlikely that the ex-users of the group would put
out the lights; especially given that the original creator of the group,
Peter Jensen, was gone before the final demise of its usefulness.
Cheers.
--
John S. Heaney
I don't train in Aikido to protect myself from the world,
but to protect the world from me.