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From: Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why mailing lists instead of Newsgroups?
Date: 25 Aug 1995 20:11:03 GMT
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
Lines: 83
Message-ID: <41laon$17g@park.uvsc.edu>
References: <41j9q3$hq3@i-2000.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hecate.artisoft.com
freyes@i-2000.com wrote:
]
] As I am getting more involved with FreeBsd I am wondering why there are
] so many mailing lists and only two (that I have seen) newsgroups?
The newsgroups came out of the 386bsd newsgroup reorganization
a while back.
The "rules" say that news group changes con only occur so often,
otherwise I'd have been petitioning to move this group from
"comp.unix" to "comp.os" a long, long time ago.
So that's why there's not more news groups.
Mailing lists have no such restrictions, and can be formed on
an ad-hoc basis, so there's more mailing lists.
Personally, I'd prefer that terminal group names in a news group
hierarchy be controlled by people involved in the hierarchy, that
is that they also be controlled on a more or less ad hoc basis.
The group formation and naming is controlled by a lot of AI's
(Artificially Important persons), so this is unlikely. You are
welcome to champion that battle yourself, if you think you have
a chance of winning.
] I personally think that newsgroups are better. Even using digest
] the number of emails are enormous after a few days. For instance
] my computer had hardware problems for almost a week and when I
] got it back up there were 143 messages and most of them where
] from the hackers and questions digests.
143 messages is *nothing*.
] I have also noticed that there are WAY TOO MANY off topic
] messages on the hackers mailing list. My impression was that
] it was a technical mailing list.
Off topic messages are a hazard of any organized group. There will
always be people trying to evangelize their points of view on
inappropriate venues. Like spams on usenet. The posts are done
because that's where the people are, not because thats where the
people who want to read it are. The fact that the right to speak
does not necessarily imply the right to have people listen to what
you are saying is lost on these people.
On the other hand, threads evolve. Once a thread has evolved to
the point where it isn't appropriate for that venue, unless there
is another venue where it is apropriate and all the participants
are already on the other venue, well, it's a practical impossibility
to move the thread. This has been the biggest force behind the
main three "off topic" discussions on the hackers list recently,
with a fourth, ISDN connectivity, coming up fast on the outside.
One possible soloution is to use a mail->news gateway, and kill
the threads which don't interest you. Another is to "split" the
lists -- actually, create more lists is really what this means --
and then people not interested in one aspect or another can
unsubscribe from the list topics that don't interest them.
The idea of splitting hackers is being discussed on the hackers
list -- note that such a discusion is itself off-topic. 8-).
By definition, one could only "appropriately" talk about
splitting lists on a list administration list, which of course,
the people affected would not belong to. 8-).
] How about making Freebsd questions a newsgroup?
It may very well be past the time period that one is required to
wait following a news group reorganization before an additional
news group reorganization can take place.
Of course, you should be discussing this on news.groups and not
here. 8-).
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.