Subject:
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Re: Newsgroup structure: some tough decisions
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.nntp
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Date:
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Mon, 5 Mar 2001 19:36:25 GMT
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Viewed:
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1714 times
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In lugnet.admin.nntp, Frank Filz writes:
> I was opposed to a .rant type group earlier, I now see that it could be
> valuable. One question though is how to get the ranting to move there.
Oh, I don't think there would be a problem with that! :-)
> I don't think we can eliminate initial rants in response to an
> announcement, but perhaps that needs to be done.
Why and how? If the group didn't allow follow-ups from other areas, then
people would just get around it by posting their follow-up rant in another
area, defeating the purpose. Or they'd start a new thread and point to the
article they wanted to rant about.
> lugnet.market.lego-direct would be the place to talk about shop at home
> deals, web store deals, etc. From the volume of traffic, I think this
> group would eliminate the need for the separate announce group, and
> would make it more likely that when the folks who have permission to
> post to announce.lsah are busy, that someone else will post the weekly
> specials in an easy to find place. Presumably folks would also report
> things like: "I just placed an order at S@H and by the way, the new
> super cool train set is now in stock!" here.
Not necessarily disagreeing, but LEGO Direct isn't the name of the business
unit that sells to consumers, and it's not even something that really
appears to consumers (except us weirdos here). The name of that is LEGO
Shop At Home, and that in turn is part of LEGO Direct. LEGO Direct is the
business unit in charge of direct-to-consumer communications. So, if there
were a specific group for LSAH, it would more appropriately be .lsah or
lsahs and not .lego-direct.
> The idea of retail is to replace shopping with something which more
> clearly points to channels for buying that one could easily find, and
> that one would expect a deal found there to be available for some time.
> Posting of storewide sales, web deals, etc. It could also stay as
> lugnet.market.shopping.
I kinda wish we'd named the .shopping group .retail originally. I'm not
sure exactly why it came out that way, but I think originally on the table
were .market.shopping.retail and .market.shopping.online and they just got
combined into .market.shopping. Of course, if there's a .retail group
without a more general .shopping group, that leaves online shopping reports
out in the cold.
> lugnet.market.swap would be the place for all those one off deals. Buy,
> sell, trade, and auction announcements would all be welcome,
Eeek -- no -- auction noise is like water -- it flows wherever it can go.
If people can post auction noise in .market.swap, everyone will because they
can.
> but note
> that I suggest lugnet.market.swap.updates to keep the daily updates of
> auction updates and "well, this is what's left of my list" in. On the
> other hand, such traffic is now low enough that it probably doesn't
> matter. Most of the non-eBay auctions being run now are simple "best
> offer by Friday" type deals, I don't think there are even many any more
> which post the current best offers.
Tell me again how auction noise belongs in a group named "swap"? :-o
> It might be worth adding a separate lugnet.market.wanted where people
> could list the items they are specifically looking for, and then folks
> can respond with offers to sell or trade (prefferably by private e-mail
> to the person) or even post "hey, call the TRU in Smithfield, they have
> at least a hundred of those on the shelf" which might be a public
> posting (since almost assuredly there are other folks looking for the
> same thing).
And auction flogs (or generally any type of obnoxious flog) would have to be
disallowed there, otherwise someone would get their friend to post a wanted
notice for them and they would respond to that with a flog.
> I'd also like to see very clear rules about what kinds of market traffic
> are allowed outside the market groups. I think most such traffic should
> be allowed in the loc and org groups if it is either announcements of
> stock at specific local retail outlets,
Ya, absolutely.
> or deals where someone doesn't
> want to deal with shipping (for example, recently Thomas Main offered a
> bunch of sets to me, not all of which I wanted, and he clearly wanted to
> not deal with 20 people each wanting a set or two. I offered the rest of
> the sets [I was interested in about 2/3 of the list] to other local
> folks with the idea that Thomas would get the sets to me, and then I
> could meet up with folks individually to distribute them). If someone
> wants to run a little auction locally, why not.
That's a sticky thing to define, but I tend to agree.
> [...] I think it would be ok for
> the seller to do so if they are responding to a direct querry.
Ah, but that's so prone to abuse! How hard is it to ask a friend to post a
query on your behalf, or jump in tangentially at the slightest drop of a
hat?
> I think
> that a certain amount of discussion of the kits being produced by AFOLs
> is also reasonable. Larry and the other folks offering train kits for
> sale are definitely doing good things for the train community. On the
> other hand, Larry's posts do come off a bit as a flog, so perhaps we can
> explore how Larry could make those less offensive to folks. I don't want
> to see Larry not be permitted to respond when someone asks, "Hey, what
> trolley creations are out there." He should be able to say, well, take a
> look at my PCC and mention that not only does he think that it's a cool
> model, that if you really like it, you can even buy one from him.
That's how it should be done, IMHO -- and the reader could write privately
to learn more. Anything else just becomes way too open to abuse.
> As far as debates go, I'm not sure we need lugnet.debate. I think that
> the Bionicle debate was moved to .debate because it wanted to be open to
> the larger issue of toys promoting violence. I think also that such
> discussion does't belong in the themed or other regular groups either,
> even if it is purely about whether TLC should depict violence or not.
C'mon, that kind of debate is totally on-topic to LEGO issues, and it's an
important thing to discuss in that context. If it strays off-topic (away
from LEGO, say, and into other toy manufacturers) then hey, take it to the
off-topic area. If it stays away from Technic or Bionicle and becomes a
debate about LEGO the company, take it to .debate.
> In some of the areas, if new groups are created and old ones closed, it
> may be worth folks perusing the closed groups and seeing if anything
> should be carried over to the new groups. I hope the old groups will
> stay available to nntp for read only (it would be worth the server
> re-writing posts before sending them to set "follow-ups" to the most
> appropriate group in general - for example, if the lugnet.loc.us.nc.city
> groups are closed, follow-ups should go to lugnet.loc.us.nc).
They would all be deleted from NNTP access, for two reasons: one, they
would still be available via the web archive, and two, the NNTP server needs
to be cleaned out periodically anyway. lugnet.general is approaching 30,000
messages. That can be handled without much trouble by the NNTP server, but
it's a real hassle for some NNTP clients, and it's a huge waste of bandwidth
transferring the .overview files every time someone uses an online
newsreader like tin or trn or pine that's not set up to cache everything.
In other words, sometime in the next few months I intend to expire old
articles from the NNTP server -- keeping, say, the most recent one or two
thousand messages in each group. This was the plan all along and it's SOP
with NNTP, but I've just never sat down and done it yet. Before I do it, I
need to actually move all the underlying data to a new area and do some
messing with symlinks and nested directories to make sure it's all still
available exactly as-is on the website. Nothing would be lost on the
website -- only via NNTP -- and that's normal.
--Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Newsgroup structure: some tough decisions
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| (...) Are the web sales part of Shop at Home? I was originally going to suggest Shop at Home, but then I thought about the web sales. Of course the other question is where do the LICs, outlets, etc. fall? Deals there probably should be posted in the (...) (24 years ago, 5-Mar-01, to lugnet.admin.nntp)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Newsgroup structure: some tough decisions
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| Ok, some initial thoughts.... I was opposed to a .rant type group earlier, I now see that it could be valuable. One question though is how to get the ranting to move there. I don't think we can eliminate initial rants in response to an announcement, (...) (24 years ago, 5-Mar-01, to lugnet.admin.nntp)
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