Question about "dead" groups.

[D]

Hello usenet experts,

Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without any
activity for the last 15 years or so?

I have no idea about the pros and cons, so just curious about reasons
for/against such a decision.

[Marco Moock]

Post by D
Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without
any activity for the last 15 years or so?

Of course, and it happened in de.* and fr.* and in the past in big-8
too.

Post by D
I have no idea about the pros and cons, so just curious about reasons
for/against such a decision.

Pros: Less groups, people can find active groups much easier.
Cons: Old groups with a history get deleted.

I prefer deleting them.

[Adam H. Kerman]

Post by Marco Moock

Post by D
Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without
any activity for the last 15 years or so?

Of course, and it happened in de.* and fr.* and in the past in big-8
too.

Uh, no. The history of the Big 8 is tale and The Great Renaming, and
several reorganizations, plus tale's great miscification. And tale gave
us humanities.* which has seen little traffic.

During skirv's short-lived tenure, he tried to force a handful of active
alt.* groups into the Big 8 that failed utterly, but he was a piker
compared to tale.

Russ put all those -- I'm spacing out on the name -- groups with similar
names into the Big 8 so he could issue checkgroups, something tale
wasn't doing. Those were gated mailing lists.

Purges that weren't part of a tale reorganization? Those have been very
rare indeed.

Post by Marco Moock

Post by D
I have no idea about the pros and cons, so just curious about reasons
for/against such a decision.

Pros: Less groups, people can find active groups much easier.

handwaiving

Post by Marco Moock
Cons: Old groups with a history get deleted.
I prefer deleting them.

Making checkgroups shorter is irrelevant to getting anyone to post to
Usenet. Your belief that it might change traffic is false.

[Adam H. Kerman]

Post by Adam H. Kerman
Uh, no. The history of the Big 8 is tale and The Great Renaming, and
several reorganizations, plus tale's great miscification. And tale gave
us humanities.* which has seen little traffic. . . .

I'm a moron. Once again, I've posted into this moderated newsgroup that
has no reason to exist. Clearly I wasn't paying attention.

I have no business posting here.

[D]

Post by Marco Moock

Post by D
Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without
any activity for the last 15 years or so?

Of course, and it happened in de.* and fr.* and in the past in big-8
too.

Post by D
I have no idea about the pros and cons, so just curious about reasons
for/against such a decision.

Pros: Less groups, people can find active groups much easier.
Cons: Old groups with a history get deleted.
I prefer deleting them.

Thank you very much Marco. For me, personally, I would prefer deletion and
then having people re-create groups instead of living with 1000s of dead
ones.

As for archiving functionality, maybe a compromise could be to save the
dead ones in an archive or make them read only under an archive.* name or
something.

[candycanearter07]

Post by D

Post by Marco Moock

Post by D
Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without
any activity for the last 15 years or so?

Of course, and it happened in de.* and fr.* and in the past in big-8
too.

Post by D
I have no idea about the pros and cons, so just curious about reasons
for/against such a decision.

Pros: Less groups, people can find active groups much easier.
Cons: Old groups with a history get deleted.
I prefer deleting them.

Thank you very much Marco. For me, personally, I would prefer deletion and
then having people re-create groups instead of living with 1000s of dead
ones.
As for archiving functionality, maybe a compromise could be to save the
dead ones in an archive or make them read only under an archive.* name or
something.

That would make two new groups though.. and how would you enforce R-O
besides making it moderated?

[immibis]

Post by D

Post by Marco Moock

Post by D
Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without
any activity for the last 15 years or so?

Of course, and it happened in de.* and fr.* and in the past in big-8
too.

Post by D
I have no idea about the pros and cons, so just curious about reasons
for/against such a decision.

Pros: Less groups, people can find active groups much easier.
Cons: Old groups with a history get deleted.
I prefer deleting them.

Thank you very much Marco. For me, personally, I would prefer deletion
and then having people re-create groups instead of living with 1000s of
dead ones.
As for archiving functionality, maybe a compromise could be to save the
dead ones in an archive or make them read only under an archive.* name
or something.

Archiving is for archivists, and they will manage to archive whatever
they want to archive no matter what. On the other hand, designing a
system for archival instead of active use leads to severe constraints on
what kind of system you can make. Archives are TOTALLY DIFFERENT from
live sytsems.

As Usenet is a distributed system under the control of different people,
a group rename like that done on one system wouldn't happen on all of
them and there's no way to instruct other systems to take action besides
the ways already accepted (mostly adding/deleting groups).

[Tristan Wibberley]

... For me, personally, I would prefer deletion
and then having people re-create groups instead of living with 1000s
of dead ones.
As for archiving functionality, maybe a compromise could be to save
the dead ones in an archive or make them read only under an archive.*
name or something.

Well, if they're dead and the users mustn't be disturbed by their names,
the nntp servers can just stop listing them to their users, meanwhile
all the metadata remains accurate. But then, they'll remain dead and how
will users discover that there is a valuable thing that their political
environment made die?

Its just that they're in the list your nntp service sends you that's
your problem, ask your service to keep them a secret from you.

[Tristan Miller]

Greetings.

Post by D
Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without any
activity for the last 15 years or so?

There have been several such discussions in the past, but AFAIK none
after 2011.

Back in 2007 the Board adopted a policy for removing extremely
low-traffic unmoderated groups.

Some time between 2007 and 2010, it started to establish a Dead Groups
Task Force that would be responsible for maintaining and implementing
this policy and for proposing lists of unmoderated groups to remove en
masse.

It seems that the work of this task force resulted in two such mass
removals, one in April 2011 [2] and one in August 2011 [3]. Further
documentation about these two mass removals is documented on the Board's
wiki [4].

Regards,
Tristan

[1] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2007-10-02-low-traffic-result

[2] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/The_Great_Downsizing_2011/1

[3] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/The_Great_Downsizing_2011/2

[4] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Mass_removal_of_groups

[D]

Post by Tristan Miller
Greetings.

Post by D
Has there ever been a discussion about removing old groups without any
activity for the last 15 years or so?

There have been several such discussions in the past, but AFAIK none after
2011.
Back in 2007 the Board adopted a policy for removing extremely low-traffic
unmoderated groups.
Some time between 2007 and 2010, it started to establish a Dead Groups Task
Force that would be responsible for maintaining and implementing this policy
and for proposing lists of unmoderated groups to remove en masse.
It seems that the work of this task force resulted in two such mass removals,
one in April 2011 [2] and one in August 2011 [3]. Further documentation
about these two mass removals is documented on the Board's wiki [4].
Regards,
Tristan
[1] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2007-10-02-low-traffic-result
[2] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/The_Great_Downsizing_2011/1
[3] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/The_Great_Downsizing_2011/2
[4] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Mass_removal_of_groups

Ah great! Thank you very much for the information. It does sounds like a
logical and good thing to do from time to time.

Best regards,
Daniel

[Steve Bonine]

Post by D
Ah great! Thank you very much for the information. It does sounds like a
logical and good thing to do from time to time.

There are currently 2,016 groups in the Big-8 hierarchies. The first
order of business would be to create a definition of "dead" and apply it
to these groups. I'm not sure that could be automated, in the sense
that the definition of "dead" needs to contain the term "on-topic
traffic". Would even the current sophistication of AI be able to look at
recent traffic and judge if it was "on topic".

But even if we assume that it is possible to build a list of absolutely
moribund newsgroups, what then? Someone issues hundreds of rmgroup
items, and some of the news admins act on some of them.

What have we accomplished? The current problem of hundreds of dead
newsgroups is changed to hundreds of dead newsgroups where the list
differs from provider to provider. By investing many hours of labor,
IMHO the problem is now worse.

[gbbgu]

Post by Tristan Miller
It seems that the work of this task force resulted in two such mass
removals, one in April 2011 [2] and one in August 2011 [3]. Further
documentation about these two mass removals is documented on the Board's
wiki [4].
Regards,
Tristan
[1] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2007-10-02-low-traffic-result
[2] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/The_Great_Downsizing_2011/1
[3] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/The_Great_Downsizing_2011/2
[4] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Mass_removal_of_groups

Interestingly, rec.games.frp.industry has started to see a few more posts
recently (including myself, I did not know it was a removed group)

I'm sure there are other groups that get posts by people not knowing they've
been removed.

[Marco Moock]

Post by gbbgu
I'm sure there are other groups that get posts by people not knowing
they've been removed.

They their servers are not well administered.
Google groups was one of them.
Do you know others?
Do you have the msgids of those posts?

[D]

Post by Marco Moock

Post by gbbgu
I'm sure there are other groups that get posts by people not knowing
they've been removed.

They their servers are not well administered.
Google groups was one of them.
Do you know others?
Do you have the msgids of those posts?

If removal messages are voluntary for administrators, this does not
surprise me at all.

[Marco Moock]

Post by D

Post by Marco Moock

Post by gbbgu
I'm sure there are other groups that get posts by people not
knowing they've been removed.

They their servers are not well administered.
Google groups was one of them.
Do you know others?
Do you have the msgids of those posts?

If removal messages are voluntary for administrators, this does not
surprise me at all.

They are voluntary because of the technical structure of usenet.
Nobody can "enforce" that an admin processes them.
They are more likely a convention that most of the admins follow.

Google didn't.

[D]

Post by Marco Moock

Post by D

Post by Marco Moock

Post by gbbgu
I'm sure there are other groups that get posts by people not
knowing they've been removed.

They their servers are not well administered.
Google groups was one of them.
Do you know others?
Do you have the msgids of those posts?

If removal messages are voluntary for administrators, this does not
surprise me at all.

They are voluntary because of the technical structure of usenet.
Nobody can "enforce" that an admin processes them.
They are more likely a convention that most of the admins follow.
Google didn't.

Ahh, I see. Do you know if there is some good document that explains the
workings of usenet in a more easy to follow way than an RFC? It would be
very interesting to read up on it.

[candycanearter07]

Post by Marco Moock

Post by D

Post by Marco Moock

Post by gbbgu
I'm sure there are other groups that get posts by people not
knowing they've been removed.

They their servers are not well administered.
Google groups was one of them.
Do you know others?
Do you have the msgids of those posts?

If removal messages are voluntary for administrators, this does not
surprise me at all.

They are voluntary because of the technical structure of usenet.
Nobody can "enforce" that an admin processes them.
They are more likely a convention that most of the admins follow.
Google didn't.

Google was so disconnected from the community I'm not suprised they
didn't bother to follow convention.