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Awatmath.1805 net.news,net.news.group utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!watmath!bstempleton Sat Feb 20 12:13:15 1982 school.xxx I don't think this is a great idea, mail is probably better. The net is really for cases when the items should go to every site they should go to. Often people create groups that only 4 or 5 people contribute to. Those groups should be set up in subnets with uurec and sendnews. Perhaps the creation of a mail alias (or whatever can be done) for uurec should be encouraged on all sites, to make it easier to set up subnets on certain groups. A Prof here asked me if they could set up a group net.ikonas to talk about ikonas frame buffer problems. He had a list of 5 people who would use it. It makes more sense here to set up a private group among those sites rather than let the whole net know everybody's ikonas problems. once rmail is modified so that it takes multiple users, then in theory a mailing list will be just as efficient as a newsgroup, and that can be used. In the meantime, perhaps we should pick a standard name for a mail alias to be used on all sites to point to a news from mail receiving program so that smaller groups can be set up. When a subnet is created, of course, this should be announced to the whole net so that those interested can join.

I like the arpanet group formation method somewhat. It starts off as a bunch of friends mailing eachother, it grows in size until somebody decides to set up an alias for people to mail to. After that if it gets bigger, it is eventually digested (something we cannot do too well on the usenet)

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