🚀 go-pugleaf

Some significant part of the volume in net.announce has consisted
of conference announcements and calls for papers.  I've worried
a couple of times about this, but when I ran a survey, the readers
told me they wanted them to remain in the newsgroup.

Then Brian Reid's arbitron statistics came out, showing that 75%
of the people on the net have unsubscribed from net.announce.
Of course, the only ones voting in my survey were those who are
still getting net.announce; those who have unsubscribed due to
conference postings (or for any other reason) didn't vote.

I propose that we create a new group especially for conference
postings - both calls for papers and conference announcements.
This newsgroup could be called net.conference.  (If the net
would prefer mod.conference, this is fine too, although I would
prefer someone else be the moderator.)  Another possibility is
net.research.conference.

Once this group is created and in use, I'd like to rename
net.announce as mod.announce, which is what it really should
be called.  I'd also like to encourage people to NOT unsubscribe
to mod.announce.  Other than modifying readnews, rn, and vnews
to force people to subscribe, I'd be interested in ideas.
For example, we might have two groups: one for routing announcements
(other than conferences) such as net.announce has had, and another
one, say mod.must-read (better names, anyone?) to be used once or
twice a year for really critical things for everobody.

Followup discussion in net.news.group, please.  If you're just voting,
please mail the vote directly to me.

	Mark Horton