From: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o) Subject: Re: Alternatives to splitting the newsgroup Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 00:46:37 GMT
No, actually, it would be very hard support the new groups. There are
two problems. The first is cross-posting. People do it a lot, no
matter how you try to stop them, and with mail, you can't eliminate the
duplicates without a lot of work, and then you have to decide where the
article should go. The second problem is that having the digest track
several groups would require a lot of changes to the perl script as it
is currently written; the assumption is fairly strong that there is only
one newsgroup. You could have separate digests for the different
newsgroups, but that's really unwieldy, and it still doesn't solve the
crossposting problem.
Again, I really don't think the current traffic on the newsgroups
warrant splitting the newsgroup. And if we implement my suggestion of
draining off the newbie questions by directing them at a list of
volunteers, such that each question goes to only one volunteer, I think
we can further decrease volume on this list so that splitting it is
really not justified.
So far, just under 20 people have volunteered, and all of the responses
which I've gotten is positive. If we can get a couple more volunteers,
we can definitely get this service off the ground. So if you haven't
signed up yet, and you like helping people, I ask you to please sign up!
All you have to do is send me mail stating your email address and what
areas you feel most comfortable answering questions.
- Ted