Acbosgd.2137
net.misc
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Tue Mar 16 09:58:19 1982
Re:
This has all been discussed before. If you take yourselves off USENET
because you don't think trivia (or whatever) belongs on USENET, it's
your loss. (I might point out that dadla[AB] are not officially even
on USENET, since Tek seems to want to keep their existence a secret.)
At USENIX, I offered to divide net.all into net.all (for business, e.g.
Computer Science, related newsgroups) and pers.all (for personal things),
so that sites wanting only business type stuff could easily filter out
the junk, and there was not a single site that wanted to make use of this
distinction. Since there would be considerable upheaval in changing
names of newsgroups, it was overwhelmingly voted down by the sites that
wanted everything. Besides, any division into the two groups would be
somewhat arbitrary, and different sites would want to use some other
notion of what is "work" and what is "play". (Borderline groups include
net.chess, fa.info-cpm, fa.telecom, etc.)
There are plenty of mechanisms in netnews to shut off the stuff you don't
want to read. A given site can decide it only wants certain newsgroups
(or wants everything except certain newsgroups) and can arrange that its
neighbors forward some restricted set. (If you do this, don't be surprised
if some user on your site complains that he really wanted Superman trivia.)
Each user can also specify in his subscription which newsgroups he does or
does not want. You are asked before each message you have otherwise
indicated you want, whether you want it or not, and you can say no.
Finally, if you said yes and are reading a boring message, just hit DEL.
It will go on to the next message.
By the way, the proper place for discussions of this nature is net.news,
not net.misc.
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