Awatmath.2233 net.news utzoo!decvax!watmath!bstempleton Thu Apr 22 00:14:49 1982 Proliferation of newsgroups Perhaps one way to help fight the proliferation of short-lived newsgroups and arguments about group names is the following scheme: Pick an innocuous delimeter character like _ to suplement dot (.) If there is an existing group and you wish to classify your message further, stick a suffix on the end of the group with this delimeter. The data after the delimeter should be ignored by all code in news except that code of explicit subscription. It should not appear in active or in directory names. Let's say I want to talk about scare monster scrolls in rogue. I submit to net.games.rogue_scare The message gets posted by all code to 'net.games.rogue' anybody who reads net.games.rogue reads the message. Anybody who explicitly subscribes to net.games.rogue_scare will get it, and anybody who explicitly unsubscribes to it with !net.games.rogue_scare will not get it. With this principle, net.followup should go away. All followups to important groups get posted to group_followup, unless the article being followed up already has a _suffix on it. As time passes, it is easy to change the _ to a . if the group becomes important enough to get its own directory and entry in the ngfile etc. What do you think? Brad Templeton ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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.