Re: More What Shall We Do?

[Doug Alan <nessus@mit.edu>]

> Vickie here. [...]

> Estimated 11,000 readers worldwide huh? A lot of you sure are
> keeping quiet!

I think the readership statistics are pretty suspect.  Most of those
"readers" are people who read a couple of messages and then never read
the newsgroup again.  It is also widely believed that the
extrapolation heuristic the aribtron program uses overestimates the
truth.

> Sorry!  I still don't understand WHY .gaffa can't be unmoderated!
> What's the problem with just passing the word around to the various
> sites that rec.music.gaffa is *no longer* moderated?

I thought I explained this already.  You are under a misconception
that there is a discussion group called "rec.music.gaffa".  There is
NO such discussion group.  There is a discussion group called
"Love-Hounds" and the "rec.music.gaffa" subset of Usenet is just one
of several distribution avenues via which Love-Hounds is distributed.
Other distribution avenues include the Internet, Bitnet, UUCP, JANet,
etc., and various bulletin board systems around the world, including
one on Compuserve and a large one at CMU.  To unmoderate
rec.music.gaffa, means to make rec.music.gaffa no longer a
distribution avenue for Love-Hounds.  In this case, people in
rec.music.gaffa could talk about whatever they want, but keep in mind
that in this case, rec.music.gaffa would no longer be part of
Love-Hounds.

>>    So if we're not in that petite coterie, we are to be denied all
>>    of the informative, educational, entertaining, and infuriating
>>    aspects of r.m.g.?

This is not the case.  Almost anyone who can receive Usenet can also
receive electronic mail from the Love-Hounds mailing list.  Several
years ago, there was only the mailing list, and things ran very well.
I had rec.music.gaffa created to ease distribution to distant UUCP
hosts, which at the time was problematic.  In actuality,
rec.music.gaffa has made distribution of Love-Hounds *more* difficult
to maintain, not less, because of buggy software for gatewaying
articles into Usenet and because of broken Usenet sites that insist on
reposting multiple copies of articles.  On the positive side, the mere
existance of rec.music.gaffa has done a great deal to advertise the
existence of the discussion group.

> rec.music.gaffa is TOO IMPORTANT to become "just" a mailing list. ***

Poppycock!  Love-Hounds ran for ages completely successfully as a
mailing list, and it could do it again.  In fact, when it ran as a
mailing list, the average quality of submissions was generally higher
because subscribers to a mailing list have to put in that little bit
extra effort to request to be part of the mailing list.  This ensures
that the members are at list a bit dedikated.  Also the mailing list
wasn't plagued by duplicated articles.  However, I think you are
missing the point.  I said that if I were *forced* to pick between
cancelling the mailing list or cancelling the newsgroup, I'd pick
cancelling the newsgroup.  This is not necessary though.  I see no
reason at the moment why the newsgroup and the mailing list cannot
continue together for a long time.

Your humble pseudomoderator,
|>oug

V is for VICKIE, whom womyn rended