From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Aug 09 2001 - 06:05:29 CDT
In <200108082029.QAA32472@darkstar.prodigy.com> davidsen@prodigy.com (Bill Davidsen) writes:
>chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) wrote:
>> So followups in existing threads will tend to get posted to oldgroup,
>> except insofar as participants correct them manually. That is why it is so
>> desirable that servers should nevertheless make them appear in newgroup,
>> by the use of the aliasing mechanism or otherwise. The users of such
>> servers should hardly notice any difference.
>The idea is to make the old group go away! By leaving the old Newsgroups
>line and having followups go to the old group, I have a choice of
>several bad things.
But having different people on Usenet see different versions of the same
article is an even worse Bad Thing (though we don't care if they see
different Xref headers, of course).
> I stop accepting post in the old group, in which
>case my users can't post and complain, or they post and I put it in the
>old group which then never goes away, or they post and I have to rewrite
>it to the new group in which case readers in the old group don't see and
>my users complain.
If you refuse to accept postings to oldgroup, then they will be forced to
modify their postings manually. A bit draconian, and they will bitch like
anything, but it will get the job done. The question is not whether there
is going to be a certain degree of chaos and confusion within the group
during the changeover following a 'mvgroup', but whether the chaos and
confusion would have been even worse if the present 'newgroup/rmgroup'
pair had been used.
Of course, it will help if sites can make oldgroup articles appear in
newgroup so far as their own users are concerned, but it seems that will
not be happening universally for some time (difficulties of implementing
it in INN, as Russ has been explaining). But I still think that is the
ultimate solution to the problem. But all we need to get started is
something that is at least no worse than what happens at present.
>There is NO way to make this invisible. At least by flat out refusing
>posts to (only) that old group I can eventually train my users, until
>management tells me to make it work because the users are complaining
>and going to ISP {whatever} because they still have the group.
Of course it would all work more smoothly if newsreaders could be made
aware of the situation and do the Right Thing, but that it less likley to
happen in the medium term than getting servers to do it.
>It won't work and it can't work, for reasons political rather than
>technical. mvgroup is a waste of time because only sites immune to user
>pressure can afford to do the right thing if the users like it or not.
It is a balancing act between the politics of hierarchy management (they
clearly want mvgroup to be a viable option) and the politics of server/ISP
management.
Anyway, I posted some concrete proposals a couple of days ago. Nobody has
responded yet.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5