On Thu, Aug 24, 2000 at 09:10:43AM -0400, Anthony J. Albert wrote:
>
> Newsgroups are superior, in some aspects, to mailing lists, for
> discussion purposes. But out of the two dozen or so mailing lists
> that I'm on, the first dozen are announcement only, and only about
> six of the rest, I'd judge, would be suitable for conversion to
> newsgroups.
>
> My biggest argument against newsgroups for every discussion is
> the waste of it. Every newsgroup that is carried on an international
> basis must be carried on every news server that is hosting these
> groups. (Admittedly, there are all sorts of ways to set up local-
> distribution groups only, but this defeats the purpose of having a
> widely-based group.) That adds up to a lot of storage used for just
> the benefit of a very few.
It's useful to distinguish between netnews technology and current
netnews implementation. The easy (lazy) way to set up a newsgroup
is to create it on the global Usenet and let most of the servers
pick it up. But there is nothing inherent in the technology that
requires that; you could just as easily create a newsgroup and
only propagate it to a few other sites.
Netnews would still be useful if it were used more often to manage
limited-distribution groups like this. Brian Kantor has said at
least once that the intention of NNTP was to replace, not supplant,
mailing lists. It's kind of depressing that we've been going
backward since 1987.
--
Regards,
Tim Pierce
RootsWeb.com lead system admonsterator
and Chief Hacking Officer
