canasia.org

How many of the pre-charter groups do actully have FAQs? Don't bunches of them?  I mean, they *are* the oldest groups on the Big 8 after all ...  talk.origins is said to have the fanciest FAQ collection on the net; news.groups has FAQs from here to Kingdom Come ...

On 23 Apr 1997 00:32:22 +0100, Andrew Gierth < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote: Are there any such? How many groups have *asked* to have charters? None that I know of officially. But I would imagine that, for most groups, the question doesn't arise until the readers want to do something with the group, and then find out they don't even have a charter. As of now, the only way they can get a charter is to rename, reorganize, or change the status of the group. My thought was to try to set something up whereby they could get themselves a charter _without_ going through all these more formal procedures. One thing that happens reasonably often is that a proposal involving the renaming of a group comes forward, and in the process of debating it people find that they want a charter or want a revision in an existing charter, but what do you know?  they don't really want the renaming!  Or it's a split, and if the renaming goes through the subgroups can be recognised in the charter but if it doesn't the charter goes on blithely asserting that foo.bar is the only place on Usenet to talk about bars in Fooland wholly ignoring the existence of foo.bar.greeble and foo.bar.gnoicie ... Not that this makes charters *important* exactly.  I'm just noting real occasions (from my skewed perspective as a news.groups reader) in which a rechartering procedure might strike people as desirable. Separately, I must admit (if I may be allowed to move from _meta_-_meta_-questions to a mere _meta_-question) that the existence of a charter-amending procedure might make for lots of useless traffic on groups as newbies showed up, complained about the charter, then found there was a relatively easy way to *act* on their complaints.  To take one group as an example, right now the hell of the RFD process is normally quite enough to discourage those who say sniffishly I want to split rec.arts.sf.written to get rid of all this fantasy!  An easier procedure might result in quarterly votes, and this would be an EXTREMELY bad thing. (I guess that's a short restatement of Shankar Bhattacharya's version...) By the by.  I'm about to post a number of short posts to this thread (defying piranha, sorry, though indeed plonking her is unusually stupid), so I'm not going to obey my own following advice.  But I think maybe a separate thread (not just a subject line change) with the subject line saying something like Charter Archive and Rechartering Process would make the topic easier for people to find, and although this would result in a fair amount of repetitive bashing of the sort that's already dominated this thread, from people who'd killed this thread from getgo, it would pay off anyway. Besides, to post such an article, Ms. Thomas, you'd have to sketch out what you're thinking of, and I'm curious; I've tangled with you enough in the past that I'm a bit reluctant as yet to sign on to your mailing list despite my interest in the topic, and I'd like a clearer notion of what you're getting into...  I took you off the hook on the news.announce.newgroups charter; now it's your turn! Joe Bernstein

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? I have on occasion tried to deal with news.admin.net-abuse.*.  I'm afraid that since I'm not a programmer, on the one hand, and I don't have a full-time job with which to watch the announcement groups, on the other hand, there's next to nothing I can usefully contribute there.  While opinions of my work here differ, I don't think they're normally quite so low as that. Sheesh...

Btw Dave, weren't you the guy who told me to go ahead and write an RFD to charter news.announce.newgroups?        hm.  you were told that?  was that a serious suggestion?  i'd        have thought that to be a joke if i had seen it.  hm. Oh, yes.  It was more or less that remark, with a couple of concurring followups, that prompted me to write mine...

I read and post to a number of comp.* groups, some of which have formal charters, some do not. I've never yet found having a charter to be an advantage when complaining to sites about inappropriate posts (usually adverts). He then went on to give a specific example. So let's see here... 1) We need charters.  (This I take to be Ms. Thomas' position.) ~1) Charters don't currently matter very much.  (See above.) 2) Charters might matter more if there were a workable way to get at them easily (c'mon folks, in the real world the UUnet archive is not *that* popular!) and to amend them  (This I take to be Mr. Allbery's position.) ~2) Amending charters easily would be dangerous.  (Recently voluminously demonstrated by Mr. Bhattacharya.) 3) ?  I want to like this idea, but that's a *real* obstacle... Well, here's my suggestion for 3); but I'm busy enough right now, and willing to defer to (on the one hand) Ms. Thomas, and (on the other) Mr. Allbery (isn't that an amazing and dandy combination!), rather than be really insistent. The first problem to solve is to make a readily available HTML and FTP archive of Big 8 charters. Such an archive would be half the battle, but without an amendment procedure would not really test the case for charters becoming more important, as stated by Mr. Allbery. Let's make the amendment procedure, for the time being, just as tough as the RFD/CFV procedure.  I gather that tale does *not* want to accept such RFDs?  Could anyone else be found who'd be willing to moderate them?  Note that this would effectively require the creation of a newsgroup to permit their posting.  (hee hee, it could be chartered vaguely along the lines of my fake charter for news.announce.newgroups and we could test *that* ho ho  It would also require either persuading the UVV to accept such votes (seems unlikely but who knows?), or forming an alternate votetakers corps and somehow shaking it down relatively fast (would UVV or the author(s) agree to donate UseVote, for example?). What it comes down to is that an easier charter-amending procedure seems *really* vulnerable to abuse:  by proponents, as Mr. Bhattacharya has suggested; by clueless people, as routinely in rec.arts.sf.written; by partisans in endless flamewars, for that matter (votes every three months just to keep score ...)  I would want to be able to assess the viability of the rest of the experiment, in *very* controlled conditions - namely a tough-as-nails charter-amending procedure - before considering making amendments easier.  If legitimate charter amendment proved to have a market under such circumstances, there would be a much better case for loosening the procedure, especially since in that case whoever was running the process would have had the opportunity to get some on-the-job training and might be better able to find ways to avert abuses. (This of course short-circuits any effort to set up a process that does *not* have one or more people on top...  But this is just my suggestion, and I'm not really a very inventive person anyway; others can try their hands at that sort of thing.) It belatedly occurs to me that with the RFD for the news.groups reorg now on the table, there are some problematic issues connected with setting up any separate groups...  (Would a re-chartering of news.groups.creation to facilitate cross-posts to news.announce.newcharters be the first order of business for the latter group?  Well, I'll still be watching this discussion with interest, but clearly there's some urgency. Joe Bernstein

     A <news.group Introduction to the Following Posts Following the purported discussion occurring on <news.groups after the publication of my Open Letter to David C Lawrence.... has been interesting. A number of phenomena have developed about the nature of seeming discussion on UseNet in general and on <news.groups in particular. The first is that substantive issues do not disappear if people [snip] them out of future posts, with the imagined pretense that the carefully deleted post to which they reply is in any way necessarily related to the issues raised. The second is the increasing clarity with which the fallacious _Ad Hominem_ attack is becoming the norm for many of the news.group regulars. This can take the specific form of immediately labeling critics with psychiatric terms or suggesting their criticisms flow from problems of drug use. In other cases, the _Ad Hominem_ argument is directly suggested as the form of dealing with critics; flame them to toast was, I believe, the formulation used. The _Ad Hominem_ fallacy gets reversed when the people engaging in the fallacy support the actions being criticized. Then an ultra-personalism of the opposite variety is introduced; they rally not to issues or policies but to the individual they declare sponsors such issues. This can conveniently leave aside the facts that it is Albert Gore's GOVNEWS, not D. C Lawrence's or that the leading financial officers of the U.S. government, not a bunch of volunteers, were behind the creation of <gov.*. Another aspect of the notion of voluntarism is the almost magical advertising jingle or universal Philosopher's Stone to handle criticism. It has become, I think, clear that those who so routinely espouse voluntarism as the refutation of critical arguments and data understand neither the data nor the arguments. This is particularly true around the practical competitive economic issues facing ISPs today, where no provider can long support the minimum user _base_ without providing full Internet service. Creation of mega-groups like <gov.* is not economically voluntary for such forces but economically compulsory; treating 1997's AOL or CompuServe as mere mechanical extensions of 1977's computer science department at Cow College shows that the people who do so understand neither economics nor history nor technical change. The idea of voluntarism also appears in the dichotomy between power and proprietary. This is seen when the response They had the power to do it is routinely treated as a sufficient response to a broad range of questions concerning whether specific acts should properly have been committed by those people who had the power to commit them. proprietary enters again in a different fashion. This occurs when people think it find that the material favorable to the creation of <gov.* is posted to <news.groups but write that criticism of the acts is somehow inappropriate when posted to the same place. A certain political basis to such claims is seen when one of the critics-of-the-critics inferentially believes that informing people of his personal difficulty with his personal killfile is appropriate but that discourse on a democratic-orientation for UseNet is not. I think the overall thrust of responses to my initial Open Letter