canasia.org

You're much too late.  Usenet is already governed, by an autocrat.  The imperative now is either to come up with a Magna Carta and make him accept it, or to work around him, probably by organizing a committee of sysadmins to take his place. David Lawrence has a certain amount of influence over only 8 hierarchies: comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk There is: 1. alt: where anyone who knows how can create any groups they wish 2. Over 400 other non-local hiearchies 3. Again anyone who knows how can create any hierarchies they wish I created news.admin.hierarchies to aid people in creating new hierarchies. Why do you and the rest of you who are so busy whining about David Lawrence out there developing new hierarchies?

The big problems of Usenet today are 1) spam on newsgroups and 2) email spam using addresses harvested from postings.  This whole business about rechartering n.a.n and all other groups doesn't do anything to address that and as such is largely a waste of time. Ya know, *none* of what I do in news.groups does anything to address either of those problems, except I suppose when I advise people about moderation possibilities; but I didn't realise that made it all largely a waste of time .  Do you feel the same way about your work on news.newusers.questions? No, actually I don't.  On that group at least, we should be able to stamp out the spam.  Furthermore, if we can get a robomoderator which 1) makes almost no false rejections, 2) eliminates most of the spam, and 3) introduces no significant delays to posting, it might be used as an example for controlling other troublesome groups. Currently we don't do anything about my problem 2 , though a robomoderator could theoretically help by supporting some sort of standard address-munging scheme. I'm sorry I was flip about your proposal.  It's just that lack of easy access to up-to-date charters has never been a problem for me in all my years of using Usenet, nor have I heard any complaints about this. You're welcome to continue in your efforts, but I expect it to help me in my reading and posting very little.

The big problems of Usenet today are 1) spam on newsgroups and 2) email spam using addresses harvested from postings.  This whole business about rechartering n.a.n and all other groups doesn't do anything to address that and as such is largely a waste of time.         you might want to rethink that statement.  just because         high taxes and unemployment are big problems in north         america, you think we shouldn't do anything about, say,         litter?  would that just be a waste of time?         not everybody has the stamina and the wherewithall to         deal with the big problems.  somebody needs to work on         smaller ones.  i agree; retro-chartering isn't on my list         of problems that need to be solved right now, but at the         very least having a more accessible archive for charters         is a fine idea, and if henrietta wants to work on that,         more power to her.  we'll see what happens afterwards.         -alix

If Tale and UVV were taken over by evil forces, and they didn't kill Usenet completely, but _did_ do something less extreme (refuse to approve any newsgroups unless their charter explicitly bans allow unexportable encryption, to give a farfetched but plausible example), people would be helpless. People are never helpless.  I'd like to tell you a little story to illustrate that fact.  In the middle of 1993 GEnie was the 3rd largest Commercial Net and still growing.  It had developed several wonderful online communities.  I STILL miss it.  Then they changed the fee structure.  They didn't just increase fees.  We would have accepted that.  They changed it so that what I had paid under $10 a month to do would cost me over $50, with no change in how I spent my time on the net.  I was already using off line readers, so I didn't have any option to do that.  A 2400 modem was considered a fast modem for GEnie, and even at that speed things regularly froze for up to 5 or 10 minutes at a time.  14000 modems were on the market but not supported. We left.  Most of us found other places to talk.  Some of the people I lost in that fee restructure, I've never found again, and I miss them. But we weren't helpless.  And who knows, maybe newsgroups and mailing lists as they currently exist are at least the result of that flood of people who needed a new home.  I had some newsgroup access before the end of the year, for example.  I doubt very much if I was alone. Oh, I almost forgot.  GEnie died.  They killed the goose that was about to lay a golden egg.  They paid the price. Stella Nemeth at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it     A proponent and proposed Moderator     for moderation of news.newusers.questions     Get the Call for Votes (CFV) at news: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it     or by email from the votetaker: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Why do you and the rest of you who are so busy whining about David Lawrence out there developing new hierarchies? Well, you know, I tried that last year.  I had the impression that I was among the voices *supporting* your effort to revive us.*, in fact, and I made a point of talking it up to my news-admin, who seemed relatively influential...  It may not be much, but I certainly did what I could. Eventually I concluded that for me to make any real difference in creating hierarchies, I'd have to to change my occupations far beyond the extent to which I've allowed Usenet to distort them already, so I stopped trying.  I went back to news.groups volunteering, which worked within an already-made system that I felt I could usefully contribute to.  Somehow I thought this was a sensible exchange of unproductive for productive work - a desirable thing for a volunteer to do. This year, I suspect I've become one of the loudest people complaining about David Lawrence.  One of my reasons for doing so is that I've seen in his actions, and inactions, reason to doubt that I *could* in fact usefully contribute to the already-made system.  If nothing else, confirmation that I had profoundly misunderstood the system in question would resolve my concerns and I could spend my time on other matters with an entirely clear conscience.  (Well, except for my name being on an FAQ about something I knew nothing about, but hey, nobody's perfect...) Being told that seeking this sort of reassurance, or some other, constitutes whining , and in effect that it is presumptuous and rude? Well, hmmm.  My mother was a volunteer for many years, and did occasionally meet up with comments like this from the professionals she worked with. She certainly taught me that the occasional comment is not the basic issue. But if that would turn out to be the *prevailing* sentiment here - that people like me are a waste of time to pay attention to - rest assured, I'd find some place to volunteer which is more mutually congenial. All that said...  I've noticed that Mr. Kneisel has returned to reclaim the thread he started, and considering how fabulously inappropriate the Subject: line is for talking about chartering procedures in the Big 8, he should probably be allowed this reclamation.  On first reading, my impression is that new his series of posts, besides some ludicrous mistakes and predictably wild claims, actually also contained some quite solid arguments.  I suspect few readers of news.groups will share this view on my part (the patterns of thought that lead me to it are ones I consider basically leftist), and I'm really not up to another huge argument at the moment; so until I am, I'm bowing out of this thread.  There are others within which people who want to tell me I'm an ungrateful whiner who should go do some real work for a change - not that that's exactly what Mr. Grobe said, and it was not me he was specifically addressing - can do so. Joe Bernstein

It might also be reasonable to see if there's anywhere in news.announce.newusers where such an archive could reasonably be mentioned; I suspect so. I doubt it. But if we ever do get a charter archive, we could probably make periodic postings to news.newusers.questions telling newusers where to go to get the charter of a newsgroup they are interested in. And if there is no charter, that would be noted in the archive with a pointer to the FAQ, if such exists. (This was not my idea, btw, it came from someone else, but I don't remember who it was.) Henrietta