From: bpwing@phoenix.princeton.edu (Ben Wing)
Newsgroups: alt.dreams,alt.oobe,alt.config
Date: 22 Jul 92 18:50:07 GMT
Subject: Re: OOBE discussion group name
Organization: Princeton University
X-Subliminal-Message: You can quit reading news anytime you want.

In article <1992Jul22.165415.4302@gnosys.svle.ma.us> gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo) writes:
|Since creating the alt.oobe newsgroup earlier today, I've received a
|couple of messages saying it would have been better to have discussed
|the name of the group in alt.config.
|
|My control message that created alt.oobe contained the comment:
|
|> Creating new newsgroup to discuss Out-Of-Body-Experiences, as agreed to
|> by a goodly number of participants in alt.dreams.
|

This problem (of hasty newgrouping) seems to come up again and again ...
I'm really surprised how many people don't realize that you're supposed to
discuss (or at least mention) the creation of a new alt.* group in alt.config
before newgrouping it, just to avoid total chaos.

See, the problems here are two:

1) Although people who are into psychic stuff may as a rule know what "OBE"
   or "OOBE" means, the **vast** majority of others don't.  To nearly everyone
   reading Usenet, the acronyms are totally meaningless.  Having a cryptically-
   named newsgroup is a Bad Thing.  Imagine a bunch of groups like this:

   alt.afl
   alt.ode
   alt.g7
   alt.sids
   alt.tt

   Can you figure out what they're for?


   Okay, here goes:

   alt.afl  (for the discussion of the American Federation of Labor)
   alt.ode  (for the discussion of Ordinary Differential Equations)
   alt.g7   (for the discussion of the Group of 7 Industrialized Nations)
   alt.sids (for the discussion of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome)
   alt.tt   (for the discussion of Technology Transfer)

   People in the respective fields might say the acronyms are "obvious", but
   to outsiders that's not the case (and some of these acronyms are much more
   well-known that "OOBE", I think).  At least saying alt.math.ode or
   alt.med.sids or alt.labor.afl (or alt.org.afl) might clarify it a bit
   more.

   alt.out-of-body is a good deal clearer to the outsider, and alt.dreams.oobe
   at least gives a hint as to what the group is about, even if it's not
   technically correct.

2) The names of the alt.* groups are way too chaotic, with many too many
   top-level divisions already.  "alt.oobe" adds yet another top-level
   division.

|
|What do others feel?  Now that it's done, I suppose we might as well leave
|alt.oobe in place - but I suggest the first order of business should be to
|talk about the name some more.  (I wasn't aware of the protocol of discussing
|the name in alt.config, so I apologize to those who feel that I have violated
|that protocol.)  If there is a strong majority opinion to call the newsgroup
|something else, we can destroy alt.oobe and create a new newsgroup to replace
|it.
|

I would say, send out an rmgroup for alt.oobe and newgroup something with a
sensible name.  Then at least there's a reasonable chance of the group getting
widely propagated, which is less likely with the current name.  Encourage
people in alt.dreams to use the new name, not the old one.  Send mail to
Bruce Becker (news@becker.gts.org) kindly requesting him not to force the old
name down people's throats.  Some systems will still have the old name sitting
around, but hopefully it'll become defunct.

|My suggestion is that all articles about renaming take place in alt.oobe and
|alt.config (please cross-post your articles), but not in alt.dreams.  Any-
|thing about the subject of OOBEs should be cross-posted to alt.dreams, both
|for reasons stated in my earlier article, and so that if we do make a switch
|at some point, articles will not get lost during the transition.
|
|Now - about the name itself.  I got a call this morning from someone who
|thanked me for creating the newsgroup and who said he feels that a name of
|alt.dreams.<anything> would not be good, since it would characterize the
|experience as being somehow related to dreaming.  I agree, for reasons
|related to what we discussed before about not using the "astral-projection"
|name, which would characterize the experience.
|
|For me, then, the choice is among alt.oobe, alt.obe, and alt.out-of-body.
|As stated before, I prefer alt.oobe over alt.obe since the first term, used
|by some authors on the subject (such as University of California professor
|Charles T. Tart, who wrote the foreword to Robert Monroe's _Journeys_Out_of_
|_the_Body_) can be pronounced ("oobey").  I would accept alt.out-of-body,
|and think it has the advantage of being more descriptive than alt.oobe or
|alt.obe, but it's more of a hassle to type, and, since it's more than four-
|teen characters in length, the name would be truncated by sites running
|"notesfiles" rather than some flavor of Usenet news (I'm thinking especially
|of the IGC/APC systems (PeaceNet/EcoNet, and affiliates like GreenNet, Web,
|Pegasus, etc)).  Well, I guess "alt.out-of-bod" isn't all that bad.  :-)
|

The 14-character limit is for each segment of the group name, not for the
entire name -- otherwise groups like comp.sys.ibm.pc.* would be unreadable.

|However, I wonder just *how much* more descriptive "alt.out-of-body" is than
|"alt.oobe."  There may be people who have heard the term "out of body exper-
|ience" who have not come across the acronym "OOBE," but I suspect they are
|fewer in number than those who have heard of neither one.  Yes, perhaps the
|term "out-of-body" is more intriguing than "oobe" to someone who knows of
|neither.

Hmm, I would conjecture that there are easily 100 times as many people who
would recognize the term "out-of-body" vs. the term "OOBE".  I bet most
people, in fact, have at least heard the term "out-of-body experience".


ben
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