Acbosgd.161 net.news utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Tue Dec 1 00:10:50 1981 Re: complain, complain The method for starting a new newsgroup is indeed what mhuxa!presley says - you announce it to net.general. If a reason to change the name appears in the first few days, fine, you change it. Very often the reason becomes apparent after a short period of actual use (thus, fa.apollo turned into fa.works). So there is no need to wait before actually using it. But be warned that many sites will have to update their ngfile and so might miss a few days worth until a human takes action for some users to be able to read the news. The criterion for combining newsgroups is simple: this is a users network. If the users want to combine, they combine. If they aren't necessarily interested in each others stuff, they don't. The net.games folks are doing totally different stuff from what net.chess is doing - likewise scuba and ski are quite different, and if I were one of them I wouldn't want to wade through the other. The heirarchy idea sounds wonderful, and deserves further consideration. It should work with existing software, modulo the requirement that newsgroup names are only significant in the first 13 characters in B news (because they are stored as directories, and a . file has the length, taking the extra character). Some thought might be given to changing .'s to /'s for file storage - this would solve the length problem and if the number of newsgroups keeps growing the linearity of UNIX directories might start to become a problem. Mark Horton ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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.