Acbosgd.2137 net.misc utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Tue Mar 16 09:58:19 1982 Re: This has all been discussed before. If you take yourselves off USENET because you don't think trivia (or whatever) belongs on USENET, it's your loss. (I might point out that dadla[AB] are not officially even on USENET, since Tek seems to want to keep their existence a secret.) At USENIX, I offered to divide net.all into net.all (for business, e.g. Computer Science, related newsgroups) and pers.all (for personal things), so that sites wanting only business type stuff could easily filter out the junk, and there was not a single site that wanted to make use of this distinction. Since there would be considerable upheaval in changing names of newsgroups, it was overwhelmingly voted down by the sites that wanted everything. Besides, any division into the two groups would be somewhat arbitrary, and different sites would want to use some other notion of what is "work" and what is "play". (Borderline groups include net.chess, fa.info-cpm, fa.telecom, etc.) There are plenty of mechanisms in netnews to shut off the stuff you don't want to read. A given site can decide it only wants certain newsgroups (or wants everything except certain newsgroups) and can arrange that its neighbors forward some restricted set. (If you do this, don't be surprised if some user on your site complains that he really wanted Superman trivia.) Each user can also specify in his subscription which newsgroups he does or does not want. You are asked before each message you have otherwise indicated you want, whether you want it or not, and you can say no. Finally, if you said yes and are reading a boring message, just hit DEL. It will go on to the next message. By the way, the proper place for discussions of this nature is net.news, not net.misc. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.