From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) Subject: Re: Alternatives to splitting the newsgroup Date: 21 Jul 1992 20:52:15 GMT
tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o) writes that splitting c.o.l would
cut the Fidonet and Linux Digest mailing list people out in the cold.
The Linux Digests mailing list should be easily fixed to support the new
groups (correct me if I'm wrong, since I don't know anything about how
it is implemented, but I can't see any obvious difficulties). Ditto for
the Fidonet gateway, at least as far as technical difficulties are
concerned. Political difficulties are a different matter: it is my
understanding that the Fidonet people have a stronger tendency to let
things be as they are because of (valid?) fear for trouble if anything
changes. However, even if many people are going to get hurt by it, I do
think that _if_ a split was necessary, it should be done even if the
Fidonet people were going to be cut out.
What _is_ the possibility of changing the Fidonet gateway? Can the
person running it comment?
Theodore also suggests that I add a section on Usenet etiquette to my
meta-faq. I'd like to, but the meta-faq (already in my crontab and
posted!) is too long for my liking as it is. But I'll look into it.
I'll also make a proposal: how about a mailing list (possibly newsgroup,
but that's what were trying to avoid :-) that summarizes the contents of
c.o.l: it would have some volunteers who take turns (a week at a time,
perhaps) and write summaries of all the threads in c.o.l, i.e. when
somebody asks a question and a zillion people answer it, the summay
contains just the question and a distillation of the answers. (It is my
opinion, that much of summaries would be like:
455 questions answered in the FAQ and other documentation asked
this week, along with 784 answers to the questions. All of
these articles were unnecessary.
But unfortunately I have no researched data to back me up.)