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 20:25:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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1643 times
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Todd Lehman wrote:
> > 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.
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 same group (my thought is that the
overall traffic volume is low enough that there isn't any point having
multiple places for these items).
> > 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.
I would still tend to consider online sales "retail". I think the
.shopping name could be continued, in general I think that group does ok
and perhaps it just needs refinement of its mission and then gentle
reminders when folks stray.
> > 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
Remember, I was suggesting a lugnet.market.ebay. After this, the current
auction traffic is approximately zero. Are you backpedalling from this
statement:
> > > I don't think it can still be true that auctions are frowned upon in the
> > > same way that they once were, and I'm challenging the notion that they
> > > necessarily need to be separated from straight sales.
Basically my idea was that .swap was for all the small time relatively
informal deals, be they straight sales, trade offers, or even
mini-auctions.
I guess one more group might be necessary, lugnet.market.parts-auctions
for announcements of the MA and Auczilla parts auctions (hmm, but then
where do you announce the next 500 sets Auczilla...).
> > 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.
Are we really worried about people seeding requests? Has that ever
happened? I'd hate to not be able to respond to someone who despaerately
wanted some set which happened to be a real bargain over on some little
known auction site (or even on eBay). If one is expected to not reply to
the group about auctions, I'd even more expect that privately e-mailing
the person about such and such an auction has the item they want would
be even more frowned upon.
Let's step back and examine exactly why we need to treat auctions
differently. There appears to be this fear constantly bandied about that
someone will leave Lugnet because they happen to hear about an auction.
Outside of such a fear, what is the real difference between an auction
and any other transaction? No matter what type of transaction, each
party needs to evaluate if the price (or potential price) is worthwhile,
to evaluate if the hassle of completing the transaction is worth it (for
which clearly an auction has certain hassle factors), etc. If the
particular buyer doesn't like auctions he can ignore those responses.
I've ignored responses when I asked for a list of things, and someone
has responded that they have one 1x4 plate with towball for 50 cents
plus $5 shipping by camel from Europe (ok, so that was made up, but I
have ignored offers which were just too much hassle for the item in
question - but if someone points me to an auction for a Pirate keychain,
I'll be pretty quick about going and checking it out [and this did occur
recently - thanks Sheree R. - too bad it went for too much]).
> > 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 can also be left up to community discression some, so as long
as it isn't abused, they will probably continue to be welcome. The first
time someone realizes there isn't a community prohibition against
running a mini-auction in lugnet.loc.us, I bet that will change (well,
perhaps not, how many people really read lugnet.loc.us...).
> > [...] 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?
Well, I think if the guidelines limited the way the reference could be
given (I think primarily that it should be low key) as below, that it
won't be too bad. Again, are we really worried about people seeding
requests?
> > 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.
I guess. I have to say I'm pretty divided on debate issues. I think a
certain amount of debate is good in the theme areas, but as soon as it
starts to get "nasty" (as mentioned in another post), or starts to
broaden or stray, I think it definitely needs to be moved. Given the
difficulty of moving threads once they get well underway, I would prefer
policies which moved debates to a .debate group (whether it be a single
one or a LEGO related one and a totally non-LEGO related one), earlier
rather than later.
> > 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.
Oh no... how will I keep track of which articles I have yet to read to
process into my mega links pages... That's my concern for keeping nntp
access somehow is that I have certain articles bookmarked currently by
keeping them marked unread. If they are made no longer available by
nntp, they're gone. I guess I've been taking advantage of Lugnet's not
flushing them. I wish there was a way to more easily generate web URLs
from the newsreader, that is one of the things which slows down my
indexing (another one for anyone who might be watching is not preceding
your URL with an http://, the newsreaders I use only create a clickable
link if the http:// is present - if it isn't, I need to do something to
get another browser window open, then cut and paste your URL in, after
first remembering to clear the URL field in Netscape on Unix here at
work...).
--
Frank Filz
-----------------------------
Work: mailto:ffilz@us.ibm.com (business only please)
Home: mailto:ffilz@mindspring.com
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Newsgroup structure: some tough decisions
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| (...) To the best of my knowledge, yes. LEGO Shop at Home (both online and offline) is still run by Steven Hawco, who started it some 15 years ago. Steven Hawco reports to Brad Justus. (...) No...(more below)... (...) Oh, see, to me "swap" means (...) (23 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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| (...) Oh, I don't think there would be a problem with that! :-) (...) 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 (...) (23 years ago, 5-Mar-01, to lugnet.admin.nntp)
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