From: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Newsgroups: news.future
Subject: Re: NetNews, a blueprint for survival
Date: 8 Jan 93 21:44:23 GMT
Reply-To: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Followup-To: news.future
Organization: Carderock Division, NSWC, Bethesda, MD

In news.future, alain@elevia.uniforum.qc.ca (W. A. Simon) writes:
>capacities; let's just say it has gotten out of hand, or at least
>very nearly.

I don't think so.  It has gotten larger, but not out of hand.

>The growth is unsustainable in the current environment.

Unsustainable?  I think that's a little strong.  The net will
continue to grow and everyone will continue to deal with it.
As the net grows, so does the power of computers and communications.

>Unless we change something about the way we work it, we are about
>to turn our machines off, out of boredom, frustration and
>disgust.

This will never happen.  If your machine is overloaded by the
volume you will do whatever you need to solve the problem.  Turning
off the machine is not the option most people would pick.

You can buy more disk.  You can move news to a larger machine.  You
can buy faster modems.  You can can buy more phone lines.  It's
easy to buy and run a machine that can handle a full news feed.  It's
just a question of whether the cost is worth it to you.

Then there's the other option - you can cut down on the number of
newsgroups you get.  This is very common.  It's done all the time.
It's easy to do. It doesn't require you to get everyone to change the
way USENET works.  It just means that some systems have to continue
getting full news feeds so the news can continue growing.  But this
is no problem.  There will always be sites like UUNET, PSI, etc
that will do this for us.

A lot of people (like us) are using T1 lines to move news.  Do you know
how much of a T1 line is consumed by a single "typical" full news feed
in 24 hours?  Less than 5 minutes worth.  It's no big deal.

>But we have no Plan B.

We have plenty of Plan Bs.  More then we need.  And there more on
on the way every day - like ISDN.

>The first premise that needs reconsidering is that any decent
>feed must be a full feed.

As I said, people do this all the time.  As a matter of fact, there are
so many alternate hierarchies that the concept of a full feed doesn't
really exist anymore.  No one is really getting a full feed these
days.

>The second premise is that - for most
>sites - the news must all come from one single place.

We get news from about 5 different places.  This is common on the
internet - but not as common for dial-up uucp sites.  Basically,
you concept is already being done.  We get dod.* from one
place, ieee.* from anohter, alt.* from 2 places, relcom.*, vmsnet.*
and bitnet.* from another, and the other "main" groups from 2 other
sites.

What good does getting news from more than one site do you if you
only have one modem?  If you "had" to get news from multiple sites
you would, but if you could get everything you need from one
site, why not do it that way?

>I find it surprising that no system, of the public domain news
>distribution products I have seen so far, permits dynamic
>updating of ~news/sys files at the feeder sites, by the feedee

Yes, that is needed, but it's no big deal.  It will happen.  I
too know of at least on PC based system that has this working today.
(but it's not PD and not for sale at this point).

For normal feeds, you need something more complacated.  You basically
need two sys files.  One that the feeder can use to control what
(and when) he is willing to send to the feedee, and the other
which is controled by the feedee that defines what he currently
wants to be getting.

This is a feature that many people would like to have, but it takes
a lot of work to make changes like this.  What do you expect for
free?  If you like it so much, write it.

If this was as much of a problem as you seem to think it is, then
someone would have done it.  The fact that you don't see the feature
is just an indication that there isn't that much of a problem.

>One site could decide to specialize in sex, or politics.

This type of thing can never be done for the general case.  Usenet is
great because it's uncensored.  True free speach.  And the only reason
it's uncensorewd is because there is no "one source" that the people
can attack.  If one site was set up as the master site for alt.sex, how
long do you think they would last before they would be closed down for
selling porn?

No, the general flooding algorithm that's in use today is part
of what made Usenet the success that it is.  If you change
that, it won't be Usenet any more.

>Conclusion

There is no problem that needs to be fixed.  There are lots of little
improvements that can - and will - and are being - made over time, but
the general design of the network will remain the same.

But while I'm talking about your ideas, let me throw in some
of my crazy ideas:

The one thing that in my mind is getting harder and harder to
deal with is the constant creation and deleation of groups.  This
is also the only aspect of Usenet that needs some type of central
rules and control.

Many people have talked about how to get rid of the concept of groups
in the past, and I've been doing some thinking about that.

I'd like to write (if I only had the time :-)) a news system and
newsreader that didn't need to deal with newgroup/rmgroup messages.
It would be completely compatable with the current system, but it
would treat the news articles as one stream of information.

There would be no active file.  It would be more like one large
newsgroup.

With the news reader, instead of subscribing and unsubscribing to
groups, you would instead define your own set of "groups" or folders.
Along with each folder, you would define which articles would show
up in the folder.  You could specify, for example, that every article
posted to news.future would show up in my "news.future" group.  In
this case, it would basically act the same as a normal group.

But you could also specify information other than the newsgroup name
for sorting articles into folders.  You could specify words in the
subject, or author, etc.  This way I could set up a folder that
received every article posted by a friend of mine.  Or every artice
posted on some subject I was interested in.  And if possible, it would
be real nice if you could sort articles by keyword in the body of the
message.

With this system, the old concept of groups would still exist, but
there would be no requirement to keep track of groups.  The concept
of deleteling a group would no longer be required.  If there were
no articles on the system for a certain group, then the group
doesn't exist.

There are a lot of technical problems (and details I thought about but
not mentioned) with trying to make this work, but I think it would be
possible.  I hope to find some time one day to work on it.

Curt Welch