🚀 go-pugleaf

Some comments on Alain's article for general digestion: I disagree
with his underlying view of Usenet which is the basis for his
proposals.

In article <24001@elevia.uniforum.qc.ca> alain@elevia.uniforum.qc.ca
(W. A. Simon) writes:

>Full feed
>
>A full feed is not readable by any one individual.  Too often,
>sysadmins request complete feeds, just in case.  The only
>justification for such a wall to wall coverage is found when one
>redistributes the feed, whole or in part, and the aggregate
>redistributed coverage includes the whole spectrum.  It is rarely
>so, unless the sites downstreams also indulge in the "ALL, just
>in case" policy.  Another reason for full-feeditis is that news
>configuration gets real simple or, reverse side of the same coin,
>micro-management of the sys file is a pain in the spooler.

Not here.  A full feed is its own justification; one of the best
things about Usenet is all the stuff in it.  If I get less than a
full feed, I'm cutting off from some newsgroups I'll look at someday.
I don't know what they are; I'll find out when I get there, and
they'll be sitting in my news spool waiting for me.

If somebody else besides you, the news admin, reads news, it's hard to
know what they *say* what they want to read, let alone what they
*really* want to read, or what they actually end up reading.

Remember, if nobody's interested in a newsgroup, ipso facto it doesn't
exist, or there's no traffic in it.

>Smaller sites could take over some redistribution duties.  Larger
>sites would not waste resources on (in relative terms) useless
>data.

That last line is aptly descriptive of your view towards Usenet news.
What's useless to you may be quite important to somebody else; people
are using Usenet for all sorts of different reasons.

The problems of Usenet's size are real; my current feed is a 60 mile
long distance call, and I look at Usenet through a little keyhole as a
result.  But to make Usenet more difficult and less pleasant to get
at, *from the user's point of view*, is not the answer.  That's my
objection to systems like dynafeed and its ilk.

Perhaps Usenet can't keep growing till it consumes the output of every
disk manufacturer of the world and the bandwidth of all its comm
lines.  Perhaps we will have to balkanize it by dividing it in the
ways that Alain describes.  But to my eyes, that itself is a problem,
not a solution.

  --jh
-- 
John Hood					Cthulhu-- just imagine it!
jhood@smoke.marlboro.vt.us
Duke U, 1980:  "Okay, so a few systems have the net started. What next?"