Re: Newsgroup ? (Was: Re: lynx-dev May 4th subscription instructions)

[David Woolley]

> 
> But if you create newsgroup in some local hierarchy,  people will have
> problems accessing it.  If we use alt,  I am still woried about
> propagation.  

Even if you manage to create it in comp, smaller sites won't carry it
because it won't be sufficiently mass market.  (I've lost access to
Nortel PABX discussion because someone decided to create a minority
newsgroup which doesn't get fed to my office ISP, even though there was
no problem with the extremely low volume mailing list.)

The real problem though is that there is already a newsgroup which
covers Lynx, and not much else, the ...browsers.misc one.  Last time
I looked at this it was full of MSIE and Netscape stuff.  The problem
is that mass market users don't understand that misc groups are for
things which don't have more specific groups and will cross-post there.
The specific problem for Lynx, is that a large proportion of these people
will actually cross-post to every single browsers.* group, rather than
try to work out the correct one.  (Many IIS users hit all the IIS groups,
including the Tripoli one, which is the MS indexing engine one, sometimes
even when the question isn't even a server one, and for these heavy cross
posts, nearly always when there is no index server content.)

That does offer some scope for fun by pretending not to realise what
they have done, and answer as though they were a Lynx user, but the
hassle factor of filtering out the off topic stuff becomes too great.
Other groups with this sort of problem have ended in flame wars, often
with the off topic posters violently asserting their right to post
off topic.

I'd therefore say that a Lynx group MUST be moderated, which brings its
own problems (moderation delay and moderation politics in borderline
cases).  (Just to repeat: threading is a user agent issue, not a delivery
mechanism one.)