Re: Usenet idea

[Ian Stewart <istewart@xxxx>]

> One more issue...I noticed that Yahoo has been home to this newsgroup
> for quite awhile. I was initially quite pleased with it at the time
> I bought by D in March 2000. However, I would like to register my
> dissatisfaction with Yahoo, and (perhaps be the first to) suggest
> that we move it someplace else. I do not aspire to be an antagonist,
> but I find it more and more difficult to browse through the mailing
> list. Wading through advertisements, slow searches and page loads,
> and annoying pop-ups all contribute to a very unsatisfactory
> experience. Being a computer scientist, I have always been a fan of
> usenet. At least then we could use Google Groups. However, I
> realize that this may not be for everyone.

I am usually mildly irritated by Yahoo's random ad behavior, but I think 
it works quite well for our purposes. I am also a huge fan of Usenet and 
have always wished there was a DeLorean and/or Back to the Future 
newsgroup, but we'd have to go through a lot of hoops to get something 
like that to happen. Just going off the top of my head, you first have 
to submit a charter to the alt.config newsgroup, composed of a bunch of 
sysadmins who decide whether or not to let it pass. Then you have to 
send out a control message, which is a special message that goes out to 
all the Usenet servers on the Internet. I believe that even then, the 
local admin of a server can decide whether or not to accept a group on 
his/her server or not. Plus, another huge problem on Usenet is spam. 
We'd have to make sure that a D group is a moderated group, which might 
make our current moderators' jobs that much harder since they'd probably 
have to turn down a massive volume of posts from spammers and every 
other kook on the Internet. Even then, I'm not sure that Google Groups' 
method of handling binaries is as robust as Yahoo's web-based interface. 
A DeLorean newsgroup is certainly possible, but I don't think it's worth 
it considering the circumstances. I for one am still happy with my daily 
dmc-news digest in the mail.

Ian
VIN# anyone looking to sell for cheap?