🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <NETNWS-L%90021612411951@NDSUVM1.BITNET> Linda Littleton <LRL@PSUVM.B
>Currently PSUVM gateways about 130 Listserv lists into Netnews.  Historically,
>we have added these gateways whenever anyone asked for them.  Should we have
>more controls on adding bit groups or should we (and other Netnews sites)
>continue to add them as people request them?  Let's discuss.

I do think there should be some form of control.  I keep finding articles
with newsgroup names in bit.listserv for which I've never seen a newgroup
control message.  And it seems some admins want to create a net-wide bit
group every time the subscription of a list reaches five users.  This is
likely to result in a chaotic jumble of groups.  I think a couple of things
need to happen before a particular bit group is created:

1.  There needs to be some consensus among netnews admins that the group
will have sufficient readership to be worth distributing via netnews.
As has been discussed, netnews is more efficient for a widely-read group,
but for only a few subscribers, mail is better.  Since I have little
experience with bitnet/netnews/listserv, I won't attempt to say how such
a consensus should be reached in the bitnet world.  I certainly wouldn't
wish news.groups upon bitnet.  (It's often more like news.groups.flamewars.)

2.  The group needs to be gatewayed properly.  There needs to be an
established method for telling the gatewayer that a group is being
created, and where its moderator is.  Perhaps the newgroup message is
sufficient, as long as everybody knows to include the relevant details
in the message and as long as they know this message will reach the
gatewayer.  And the newgroup message needs to get out to the usenet side.

I also agree that cross-posting of articles that need to be in more than
one group must happen somehow.  Given a choice between duplicating the
articles and having half the articles missing from each group, I'd pick
the former.  But hopefully we can work out a way to crosspost correctly
and avoid both problems.

-----

Someone wondered why we usenet people would want the bit.all hierarchy.
Here are our (Rice's) reasons:

-Spool space.  If we can convince everyone to read news from unix, then
we can have one news spool and everyone on campus can read from it over
the network.  (Though it looks like the only way to get all our VM/CMS
users to do this will be to write an NNTP-based newsreader for CMS.  Not
everyone can get a unix account.)

-Read all the news in one place.  We don't have room on ricevm1 for all the
usenet groups.  If we didn't have the listserv groups on the usenet side,
some of us would have to read some of our news from unix and some from
CMS.  And some people would simply rather use one of the unix newsreaders.
(Including me - I have no particular gripes with netnews, I'm just used
to unix and rn.)

-Only have to administer one news system.  I've been running usenet news
since June, and a month ago netnews was given to me as well.  So now I
take care of both.  I'd rather just have one.  Of course, it's been a
useful learning experience, since before I started, I knew around five
CMS commands.  :-)

-----

I'm glad all this is happening.  I think it's great that we're improving
the communication between Bitnet and Usenet.  I think both communities
will benefit.

Cathy Foulston
cathyf@rice.edu            cathyf@ricevm1
--
Cathy