Odd note: Diseases of News Group creation
LucFrench
It would appear that rec.toys.transformers.* seems to suffer from dread insane
author disease.
It seems to me that there are a limited number of diseases and syndromes that
tend to show up in newsgroup creation. (The difference between a syndrome and a
disease is that a disease has a small, finite cause (i.e., a very small group
of people), while a syndrome tends to be inherent in the topic.) They include:
Insane proponant/antagonist disease: Self explanitory; a newsgroup does not
suffer from this disease unless the person involved is sufficiently kooky to
dominate conversation. (Think Greg Deeter and the reorganization of rcs.*)
Old arguement, new place syndrome: An old arguement carried on in a new field
of conversation. Such things can usually be ignored, but can distort the
disscussion of (a) new group(s) heavily. (Old enemies such as Kaleb and Greg
belong in Insane proponant/antagonist disease.)
Insane author disease: The person in charge of the RFD is insane, or is of one
party in a long standing arguement. (For example, the Transformers author seems
to be strongly of the "segregationist" persuation, when seperation is not
nessisary.)
Insane people syndrome: Think about an RFD for rec.flame, and you should have a
rough idea of what this disease is. (Strong implications of both sides being
filled to the brim with kooks.)
Long thread syndrome: Wherein any disscussion about the new group will probibly
involve at least three months arguement. (Think news.admin.spam.cancel .)
Controversy of creation syndrome: Where a newsgroup's creation is inherently
controversial. (For example: rec.arts.terrorism (and yes, I do mean
"rec.arts"); or more currently, soc.culture.chernago .)
How good are these, anyway? They are drawn from limited experience with
newsgroup creation, but long experience with newsgroups in general. (I've been
on Usenet in one form or another for nearly three years; if you really need
documentation of same, look under "lfren...@aol.com".)
Thanks
Luc French
David Grabiner
lucf...@aol.com (LucFrench) writes:
> It would appear that rec.toys.transformers.* seems to suffer from dread insane
> author disease.
> It seems to me that there are a limited number of diseases and syndromes that
> tend to show up in newsgroup creation. (The difference between a syndrome and a
> disease is that a disease has a small, finite cause (i.e., a very small group
> of people), while a syndrome tends to be inherent in the topic.)
> Controversy of creation syndrome: Where a newsgroup's creation is inherently
> controversial. (For example: rec.arts.terrorism (and yes, I do mean
> "rec.arts"); or more currently, soc.culture.chernago .)
Related to this is Humpty Dumpty syndrom: The name chosen by the
proponent means exactly what he wants it to mean, even though it means
soemthing else to most other people. An example was
soc.religion.islam.ahmadiyya, a sect which is not recognized as Islamic
by most Moslems. The symptoms include a vote which turns on the
legitimacy of the name rather than the merit of the group.
--
David Grabiner, grab...@math.lsa.umich.edu
http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~grabiner
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