Acbosgd.161
net.news
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Tue Dec 1 00:10:50 1981
Re: complain, complain
The method for starting a new newsgroup is indeed what mhuxa!presley
says - you announce it to net.general. If a reason to change the
name appears in the first few days, fine, you change it. Very often
the reason becomes apparent after a short period of actual use
(thus, fa.apollo turned into fa.works). So there is no need to wait
before actually using it. But be warned that many sites will have to
update their ngfile and so might miss a few days worth until a human
takes action for some users to be able to read the news.
The criterion for combining newsgroups is simple: this is a users network.
If the users want to combine, they combine. If they aren't necessarily
interested in each others stuff, they don't. The net.games folks are doing
totally different stuff from what net.chess is doing - likewise scuba and
ski are quite different, and if I were one of them I wouldn't want to wade
through the other.
The heirarchy idea sounds wonderful, and deserves further consideration.
It should work with existing software, modulo the requirement that newsgroup
names are only significant in the first 13 characters in B news (because
they are stored as directories, and a . file has the length, taking the
extra character). Some thought might be given to changing .'s to /'s
for file storage - this would solve the length problem and if the number
of newsgroups keeps growing the linearity of UNIX directories might start
to become a problem.
Mark Horton
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