🚀 go-pugleaf

Repeating, without the "no archive" flag set. I'm going to have to
remember to leave that off for the purposes of this discussion.

spamtrap1888 <spamtrap1888@gmail.com> had written:
|
|  The goal is to have a ba.broadcast group with a high signal-to-noise
|  ratio. Participants in the chi.* hierarchy solved the problem a
|  different way. One of the participants set up a server to propagate
|  new, local groups. Trustworthy participants were invited to join, and
|  given the password. Participants had to use newsreaders that didn't
|  balk at multiple newshosts, of course.

There are several difficulties. Many people are not aware the
private NNTP servers exist and, where they do exist, they seem to
be not well used. They require extra set-up in some, if not all,
newsreaders. The natural place for someone to go when starting up
his or her newsreader is to go to the default location that is set
up.

Beyond that, a private NNTP server is little different from a web forum
in practical effect.  Someone actually "owns" it, whereas no one "owns"
Usenet in the aggregate. This is a point that is important to some
Usenet users.

The proposal team felt that the best approach was to make the
proposal and determine the level of interest for a full-fledged
Usenet newsgroup. That's where the intended audience is. Over the
years, ba.broadcast has developed a distinct community and a
distinct "flavor" in its discussions. It does seem to be more
heavily oriented toward engineering issues than, say,
radio-info.com, which is more oriented toward radio programming
ins-and-outs. There is a place for both. The moderation proposal is
being brought forward as a way to preserve the ba.broadcast
community of interest despite an apparently increasing number of
off-topic posts. One part of that community is its public
accessibility. A private NNTP server would, by definition, not be
accessible to the public. And they definitely would not be
accessible from Google Groups where, like it or not, more and more
people are reading newsgroups, owing to the number of
connectivity-oriented ISPs that are doing away with Usenet service
as an added-value feature.

I can make the argument more simply: to take a "private club"
approach (which is essentially your proposal), it would be easier to simply
set up a mailing list. But ba.broadcast itself was an outgrowth of
a mailing list, established, as I understand it, because discussions
on mailing lists don't scale up well (among other things).

-- 
Mark Roberts - E-Mail address is valid but I don't use Google Groups
If you quote, please quote only relevant passages and not the whole article.