🚀 go-pugleaf

In <43400s$pdc@clarknet.clark.net> "David H. Rothman" <rothman@clark.net>:
[re: va.alexandria]
> I appreciate your logic and sure can envision these other
> groups. But I like simply va.alexandria since it's still relatively
> short.

I am opposed to va.alexandria on the same grounds that I would be
opposed to us.va.alexandria:  the newsgroup hierarchal form is
supposed to be used to help sites get the groups that they are likely
to be especially interested in, and this breaks that model.  For
example, a site interested in IBM PCs would get the hierarchy
comp.sys.ibm.pc.*, with the implication that they are likely to have a
interest in all aspects of PCs.  A site interested in Virginia would
get va.*, but there is much less of an implication that the site has
any special interest in local issues of Alexandria.  Why would people
in Newport News or Roanoke or Bristol or the eastern shore care?

Why not start a mailing list for Alexandrians?  That's what Tacoma
Park did.

By the way, overall length of a name is one of the least important
factors in proper naming, because it is rarely typed.  When people do
need to refer to the group, even the short group names are frequently
further abbreviated.

> Add-ons could still be in the format of:
> va.alexandria.forsale. Agree with you there! 

For the benefit of overall namespace development, it is best if
names do not serve double duty as both groups and hierarchal nodes.

There are both administrative and namespace consistency aspects for
doing so.  Consistency is a very important feature in any large
organizational system, like the entire network news namespace.

Not having the name do double duty simplifies news system
administration for sites interested in taking just that group,
arguably reduces cross-posting with the hierarchy some because people
don't feel like they have to get the article in both the broad topic
area for the group and the more specific forum, lessens the perception
by some people that some topics are being "relegated to a subgroup",
and keeps more clear the distinction of hierarchy vs group in the
namespace model so that people can know what's a hierarchy and what is
a group just by the way it is referred to.

Also, when subgroups are created from a main group, some sites taking
just the parent group will fail to notice that the new subgroup exists
and will not get it by default.  This could be very important to the
way their feeds are configured, especially with the advent of INN and
its break from the B/C News hierarchal feeding structure.