🚀 go-pugleaf

jim@american.edu (Jim McIntosh) writes:

>(1) If a mainstream group exists on the same subject matter, then it
>    should be used rather than setting up another group on the same
>    topic.

Unless the creation of r.m.b.blues passes, no such group exists. 

>(2) Your statement above implies that the sole purpose of the new group
>    is simply to make life easier for a subset of the 648 subscribers to
>    BLUES-L. You may not realize you are asking us to spend machine
>    resources gateway'ing the group, asking the whole Usenet community to
>    spend resources sending these posts around the world, and then asking
>    tens of thousands Usenet sites to spend disk resources keeping your
>    posts on-line. This seems like a lot of money to just make life
>    easier for a relatively small number of people.

I understand your point. At the moment (based on some private email
with one of the people who's proposing the gateway) we ae considering
creating bit.blues-l or whatever, and either:

(a) Allowing blues-l subscribers only to post to the group, so that
the content of the group would be identical to the content of the
list. This is the arrangement that Jim is objecting to above.

(b) Allowing everyone to post to the group, and forwarding their
messages to the list. This would essentially destroy the mailing list
by making the already-hard-to-deal-with volume completely
unmanageable. 

I would be happy with (a). I absolutely oppose (b). But what about:

(c) Allow anyone to post to the group, but forward posts to the list
only if they are from subscribers. This would solve all the problems:
it would pretty much leave blues-l alone; would provide a general
blues discussion forum for the Usenet community; and it would give
current blues-l subscribers two options to read the list: the focused,
smaller version (the list) and the broader, larger version (the
newsgroup).

Is (c) technically possible? I'm not well-versed in how the
mirror/gateway software works. It seems a possible answer to Jim's
concerns that does not destroy the list as it exists now.	


-- 
Ken Ficara                                                      ficara@acm.org
       Compu$erve: 71311,1461 / AOL: KENFICARA / Prodigy:(NOT!)