From: gil@limbic.ssdl.com (Gil Kloepfer Jr.)
Newsgroups: houston.general
Subject: Re: News Feed
Date: 7 Nov 92 16:14:42 GMT
Distribution: houston
Organization: Southwest Systems Development Labs, Houston, TX

In article <eaqqTB4w165w@unkaphaed.UUCP> phaedrus@unkaphaed.UUCP (James Hartman, Sysop) writes:
>Greetings.  In a week or so, unkaphaed, dadstoy, and biff will be losing their
>primary newsfeed via xcluud, as Paul wants to take his system down, permanent-
>like.

I'm glad someone brought-up this topic because I've been meaning to say
something about it for a while now.  My apologies for the long posting,
but I think this is worth saying to at least start a discussion.

Have all of you noticed something about netnews feeds in the past few
months?  One of two things are happening -- systems are either turning
to pay systems, or they're disappearing.  Although I can't speak for
those who are still running or for the ones that left, I can say
something about the overall problem here in Houston and around the country.

The problem -- there's too much news.  Period.  In case you didn't know,
a "full" (full meaning every newsgroup that's *commonly* available in the
USA) newsfeed generates an average of 25 megabytes of COMPRESSED modem
traffic per day.  That's over 5 hours of Trailblazer traffic per day.
If we wanted to generate some redundancy in Houston (say 2 other sites),
that would be 10 more hours of modem time.  Give out a few small feeds,
and that amounts to about 5 more hours of modem time.  Time left on
one Trailblazer = 4 hours (probably mostly spent trying to connect to
busy systems).  The disk space required for 3 days of uncompressed
news is about (25 * 2 * 3) 150 meg -- not including history, log, etc
files.  The number of groups/articles has overflowed the number of inodes
on most System V-based UNIX systems (64K inodes).  To make matters worse,
there's a bunch of children out there who create newsgroups in the
alt distribution (example: alt.johnny.is.a.weenie.weenie.weenie) which
serve no purpose except to cause the creator some sick sense of power.

People have this incorrect sense that since they're not directly paying
for USENET that it's free.  It is NOT FREE.  At one point, many of us
were playing with computers as a hobby and decided to take-on the
responsibility of handling USENET connections because it augmented the
hobby.  There is now so much traffic that in order to justify handling
a full newsfeed at home, USENET needs to *be* one's hobby or one needs
to charge for the service (although there are some folks out there who
have been very, very generous with their time and resources for the
good of the rest of us, at no charge).  The truth is that in order
to handle a full news feed *effectively,* two phone lines, two high-speed
modems, a system capable of touting lots of disk space, and a person
to sort through all the "phony" groups in the active file needs to be
dedicated to the task 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  This is FAR from
what was hoped would augment a computer hobby.  It's far from what most
of us on a generous salary can afford (or justify) as an expense.

As some of you know, and many of you don't know, I was administering
the machine that HOUNIX had available for its club members.  I resigned
recently mostly because the people joining the club were doing so
primarily for a netnews/mail connection and little else.  If I were to
do the job the way it needed to be done, it would be equivalent to a
second job.  When I started looking at the subject matter and the bulk
of the articles on USENET, it was obvious that at least a quarter of it
was idle chit-chat of the kind that belongs on local BBS systems or
e-mail.  The same heated discussions and the same "me too me too"
postings seem to dominate the groups...all to the tune of 25 compressed meg
a day!  I couldn't justify spending a great deal of time keeping netnews
running, begging the club's board for equipment, and doing the other
admin duties when the folks joining the club weren't even contributing
to using UNIX in a commercial or hobby environment.

My purpose in the above discussion was to point-out what has happened
to USENET in the past 5 years and how much this costs.  I'm sure that
some people see pay systems as a threat to their "free" connection.
Consider what it costs some of the people in Houston - like Judy
Scheltema, Buster Irby, etc. - out of their OWN salaries to bring this
all to you.  Consider the massive contribution that U of H (among others)
have made to USENET.  Steve Nuchia made an enormous contribution to
USENET before he decided to move to a pay system (which is still reasonable,
when you consider the alternatives).  Personally, I feel it's time to
either cut out the garbage from netnews or face the fact that USENET
will need to be run on pay systems to help offset the massive costs to
run it.  If I were to make a choice, I would start by cutting the entire
alt hierarchy, setting (real) formal guidelines for group formation, and
starting to apply local distributions more rigorously.  Follow this up
by a more distributed form of netnews where special-interest groups are
handled by smaller systems and are acquired through getting connections
to these systems rather than one *BIG* system.  Most important, smaller
systems need to get ONLY the groups they read.  Unfortunately my choices
are overly idealistic and optimistic.  Not optimistic is that we need to
curb the growth of the weeds, and apply weed killer to those that have
gotten WAY out of hand.  (like this article I guess)

As I step down from the proverbial soapbox, I hope that rather than anger
everyone that I have opened some eyes as to what's happening.  Something
needs to be done.  Any suggestions?
-- 
! Gil Kloepfer, Jr.
! gil@limbic.ssdl.com / ...!ames!limbic!gil