From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 18:15:46 CDT
Brad Templeton <brad@main.templetons.com> writes:
> You say I should go through the immense work of creating whole
> newsgroups for a few jokes a year?
No, I think you should just use the existing humor newsgroups that already
exist in most regional hierarchies. Or you should just let people see
jokes that they might not understand. It might expand their horizons.
> Or say I want to find out who else from the Bay Area is going to see the
> eclipse in Europe? Should I create ba.astro.solar just to do this?
Post to the regular astro group, put LOCAL in the subject header. It's
not that big of a deal, and it doesn't happen that excessively often.
People do this right now and people cope. It's not important enough to
build all this junk to try to make it work slightly more smoothly.
> I see no problem with people making posts less visible to their
> "audience" at all.
I do, when they're doing it because they don't understand and are confused
by something that's excessively complex.
> If you haven't noticed, one of USENET's problems is that it is now too
> large, too global, the audience of any one newsgroup often too large.
> Anything that limits the audience is a plus.
I don't agree.
> Now in fact distributions need not be geographical. They are, as I
> propose them, simply subsets of the net, and they can be any subset at
> all.
This part works. This part also doesn't require all of the complicated
language in the draft that was posted.
> One should not have to create a new hierarchy or newsgroup -- a fairly
> major effort -- to define a subset of the net and do different things
> within it.
It's the only thing that actually works if you really want a subset.
> Controlling distributions by having your feed site handle your list
> failed, so thus the proposed change in semantics to expecting the
> control to be at the recipient end.
You're ignoring the fact that the semantic change that you're working
towards already happened years ago, like I already pointed out and you
already agreed to. Newsreaders can already do whatever they wish with the
Distribution header and practically all of them ignore it completely, like
everyone else.
> Today, so many sites use "all,!foo" and it means every distribution that
> leaks floods the net. Let the decision to use "all,!foo" or "foo,bar"
> be placed with the site or user, the party actually affected.
It already is at the level of the site or user with header filters. Where
do you think it is?
I don't intend to reply further on this subject until the next posting of
a draft. I've said my bit.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>