From: doom@elaine36.Stanford.EDU (Joseph Brenner)
Subject: Re: new group on the way, and What does it take to create a ba group?
Organization: DSO, Stanford University
	<1993Jan12.021410.24067@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Distribution: ba
Date: 12 Jan 93 02:59:34


Okay, so the next problem is to define the "topic" of this
newsgroup I'd like to see created.  The best name I've been
able to come up with so far is "ba.hangout".  

I think that there's a conflict between the way the usenet
is set up (a hierarchy of topics) and a fairly natural
tendency to develop a sense of community among the people
who frequent a newsgroup.  Once that begins to happen,
there's a strong tendency for people to start posting random
things about their lives that don't directly relate to what
the newsgroup is nominally supposed to be about.  A good
example: recently John McCarthy was posting to
rec.arts.books recently about his experiences with his son
and a voice sensitive robot toy.  You either find this sort
of thing fascinating because you're interested in the people
in the community, or you find it annoying "noise" that
doesn't belong.

Personally I've had a lot of experience with the kind of
newsgroup I have in mind, coming out of my experiences on
what used to be the default "bboard" on the old Tops-20
systems they used to have at Stanford (perhaps not
coincidentally, shedevil@vix.com is someone with the same
background).  Local newsgroups have a different dynamic from
the global ones, because there's at least some chance that
you're actually going to meet the people you're talking to.
With some luck, this helps to minimize problems with
flaming.  (If anyone has any other ideas on how to encourage
of tradition of no flaming, I'm be glad to hear them.)

So to put it simply (probably too simply), the idea is to
have a local meeting place for people to talk about whatever
they want to.  You could call it "ba.misc" except I think
that lacks personality, and doesn't give the right sense of
community.  And if you called it "ba.community" people would
think it was *about* some other community, instead of a
virtual space of it's own. 

I had some hopes that ba.general would work this way, but it
seems to be used primarily as another ba.market group ("know
any good places that do oil changes?").  And the outbreaks
of cross-posting aren't very good either: that's the kind of
thing that tends to destroy the character of a group.  Any
"general interest" newsgroup is going to be a magnet for the
people who insist on inappropriately cross-posting to at
least ten groups (seven of which they don't seem to have
ever read).  Which is why I think that "ba.hangout" should
be set up to reject any cross-postings (with a suitable
polite message) via an automated moderator.  

I think it would also be a good idea to discourage extensive
quotation of postings that are being replied to.  Possibly,
the automatic moderator software should look for lots of
lines that begin with ">"s, and ask people to take it easy
on that stuff.  

So, does any of this make sense?  It's tough to concisely
describe this as a new newsgroup, because in a lot of ways
the idea is to create an anti-newsgroup newsgroup, to do
something different from what's currently being done with
usenet.  It's hard to even say what it would be like in
advance of knowing what kind of people would be interested
in posting there.

(Here's a thought about discouraging flaming: the person in
charge of the moderating software would be able to put
habitual flamers in a list that would prevent them from
being able to post.  You give people three warnings, lets
say, and if they persist they're essentially kicked off the
newsgroup.)  

Xref: sparky ba.internet:400 ba.news.group:66