From: Ian@unipalm.co.uk
Subject: RFD: Should UK groups be sent to UUnet?
Keywords: news british uk
Followsup-To: uk.net,news.groups
Organization: Unipalm Ltd., 216 Cambridge Science Park, Cambridge CB4 4WA, UK
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 00:28:23 GMT

Up to now, Pipex has excluded "uk" groups from those fed to uunet (and
hence the rest of Usenet) mainly on the grounds that this was the
status quo.

Uunet, along with some other sites (including Pipex) is eclectic in its
choice of news. Basically, if someone wants to feed it, they'll take it,
irrespective of distribtion or group. If you buy a feed, you choose your
groups and distributions as you see fit.

You can see from the statistics posted by Uunet that they carry most
regional groups - the UK is very much the exception. Certainly, they
have the whole of eunet (except eunet.checkgroups), the French, German
(several hierarchies), Finnish, Chilean, Japanese .. you get the picture.

I have had a short email conversation with Brian Reid (he of the
news.lists postings) who is responsible for getting Usenet to, amongst
other people, the 3000 DEC employees in Britain. He is currently not
succeeding in sending the UK groups to them.

Here's a summary as I see it.

For:
    UK expats and employees of multi-nationals here want to read the groups
    Every other country except the UK does this.
    Pipex is happy to perform the physical feed.

Against:
    The UK groups may become dominated by US postings
    (Or even Russian-Canadian ones :-)

Unless I hear a clamour against the idea, I shall remove the "!uk" from
our uunet feed. I shall of course exclude uk.net.maps if its de-facto
moderators wish.

I have posted this to soc.culture.british, so that Anglophiles will see
it, but followups are set to uk.net and news.groups. For the benefit of
non-UK readers,  here's an extract from Unipalm's (two-year-old) active
file, and newsgroups file.  Uk.telecom is recent and popular.
The newsgroups entry on uk.net came as a surprise when I read it :-)

uk.announce 0000296 00258 y
uk.events 0000328 00316 y
uk.ikbs 0000134 00132 y
uk.jobs 0000673 00633 y
uk.lisp 0000014 00013 y
uk.misc 0010975 10393 y
uk.net 0000524 00479 y
uk.politics 0004236 03922 y
uk.sources 0000180 00181 y
uk.wic 0000125 00126 y
uk.jips 0000000164 00165 m
uk.net.maps 0000000265 00252 y
uk.net.news 0000000187 00188 y
uk.telecom 0000002162 01893 y
uk.test 0000001295 01171 y
uk.ukuug 0000000070 00067 y
uk.sun 0000000023 00024 m

uk.announce		Announcements of UK wide interest. No discussions.
uk.events		Forthcoming events (conferences etc). No discussions.
uk.ikbs			Discussion of Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems.
uk.jips			Discussion about JANET IP service matters. (Moderated)
uk.jobs			Situations vacant and wanted. No discussions.
uk.lisp			Discussion of LISP; especially the draft standard.
uk.misc			General interest to everyone on UKnet.
uk.net			Used by UKnet maintainers.
uk.net.maps		UK net maps.
uk.net.news		UK net news.
uk.politics		UK political discussion.
uk.sources		UK wide group for sources/reposts/requests.
uk.sun			Discussion of Sun computers. (Moderated) 
uk.telecom		Discussion of UK telecommunications.
uk.test			UK wide tests.
uk.ukuug		UKUUG related topics, announcements, etc.
uk.wic			Discussion of Women in Computing.
-- 
Ian Phillipps, Unipalm Ltd, 216 Science Park,		Phone +44 223 420002
Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 4WA, England.		Phax  +44 223 426868
	print unpack( u,q,9:G5S="!A;F]T:&5R('!E<FP@:&%C:V5R"@``,.'');
Newsgroups: uk.net,news.groups,soc.culture.british