premature dropping of unix-pc.*

[David C Lawrence]

In article <1066 at hico2.UUCP> kak at hico2.UUCP (Kris A. Kugel) writes:

   In reality, I think we won't get proper distribution of comp.sys.3b1
   and comp.sources.3b1 until:

           1. we kick and scream
           2. we figure out where the stoppages are
           3. we get a couple more "create group" messages sent around
           4. we get our groups into the regular "checkgroup" message

  5. You just sit back with the patience you displayed so well while
suffering under the distribution of unix-pc.* trying to get these
groups created and just let time do its thing.

4 and 5 will do the most toward that end.  1 and 3 (1 mostly) will do
the most to piss people off, and 2 will likely waste more of your
producutivity than it will help the overall picture.  It generally
takes in the area of two months or so for a new, mainstream group to
level off near the propagation percentages it will tend to have during
the course of its existence.  Part of this is because some admins wait
until Spaf's next checkgroups or Active Newsgroups comes out.  Another
part is just slowness of some admins and feeds to arrange themselves.

   I suspect that the cross-postings dissappear on systems that alias the new
   group.  I think the solution to the comp.sources.3b1 lack-of-distribution
   is a proper archive (accessible by anom. uucp), so we won't miss anything.

On C News systems doing refiling the cross-posted article will appear
in the group as many time as it is being filed there; ie, a
cross-posting to comp.sys.3b1 and unix-pc.general will be seen twice
(with just one inode being used) in comp.sys.3b1 on C News sites doing
such refiling.  The problems with this are that most newsreaders do
not do Xrefs until after you leave a group, and that for people
looking at Subject summaries they will see the same article in the
summary multiple times.  This is the way C News is though, at least
for now.  It also does not rewrite the header to change the group
being refiled in any way, unlike B News and aliasing.
--
    (setq mail '("tale at rpi.edu" "uupsi!rpi!tale" "tale at rpitsmts.bitnet"))