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Subject: 
Re: lugnet.trains.org newsgroup?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.trains
Date: 
Wed, 14 Apr 1999 18:34:44 GMT
Viewed: 
44 times
  
Larry Pieniazek:
I'm not against it, but do we have critical mass yet?

Difficult to tell, but critical mass isn't much of a metric here as it is on
Usenet, mainly because groups are archived and easily past-browseable and
because it is so easy to create new groups and receive them as mailing
lists, which super-intensify the focus.  Take a look at the 3 groups in the
lugnet.robotics.rcx.* hierarchy, for instance -- 131 posts in the LegOS
group, 46 in the NQC group, and 30 in the pbFORTH group.  Not high traffic,
but high-focus.  Smaller special-purpose groups also open doors to new
discussions that wouldn't have popped up (or would have quickly petered out)
in higher-level groups.

Also, what problem is it trying to solve?

Good question.  It's not; at least, I'm not aware of any problems related to
what it could do that need to be solved.  Except for what DanP pointed out
about the clout thing, which may or may not be a problem.  In any case it
might provide advantages even without the lack of a problem to solve.  Was
tossing out the idea to see how it would be received.  You guys have a much
better sense for what you could do with it than I do.  I just had a small
gut feeling that some might find it useful/helpful.

Is trains too noisy already

I don't think it is.

(I can't tell since I'm part of the noise)

(Wow, I just looked at the stats for this group, and you account for 18.3%
of the posts to lugnet.trains in the past 7 months -- 4 times as much as the
next most frequent poster.  :)

or are you thinking ahead?

Always.  :)



Matthew Bates:
I'm not against it either but I think if club related stuff were
off in another group then I'd probably never read it since I'm not
in any club. And that would remove a possible incentive to get me
interested in joining/starting/attending a club.

In the robotics sub-groups, what happens is that the lower-level groups (the
more focused groups) make occasional cross-postings to the higher-level
group (the more general group) to keep people in the loop on things.  Then
they set the followups to the focus group and go nuts on the details.



Tom McDonald:
Hrmm. I could see where that would be convenient for the clubs themselves
with spelled-out geographical description to avoid the alphabet soup for
newbies. IMO, if you start .trains.org you might want to consider which
groups could also have subgroups:

.trains.org (general org group for all LTC clubs; don't know if its useful)
.trains.org.pnltc
.trains.org.gnwltc
.trains.org.foo-ltc

How's that?

I like it.  :)  In fact, this is exactly how it all came up -- in a thread
yesterday in the lugnet.cad.dev group -- homing in on a newsgroup name
for focused discussions related to ldraw.org:

   http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.cad.dev:1259

If and when any *LTC club wanted a focused discussion group here, it would
be nice to have a plan in place for the creation of it, to help things go
smoother and remain more consistent.


At this point though, I don't think there is enough noise to
warrant splitting .trains for any other purpose other than creating a
place for club-specific news and being organized for the future, which
does sound like Todd to be organized and be ready.

Yeah, that was the basic idea -- I certainly don't want to try to split the
trains group at all.  Just want to see if people would find a special focus
group useful -- to augment things, to take the trains cause in new
directions, not to siphon traffic away or break people apart.

If it's too early for an lugnet.trains.org subgroup, that's OK.  I mainly
just wanted to know whether the basic idea/principle/nomenclature/structure
was sound.  Sounds like it is, since you independently arrived at a similar
conclusion.


But then again, since I don't belong to a LTC (yet), there might not be
enough consistent news to warrant such groups. Yet again, there are many
.loc subgroups which have lain dormant since the dawning of lugnet so
maybe the aspect of infrequent use doesn't matter.

I'd say have a stroll though the sub-groups of lugnet.robotics --

   http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/rcx/legos/
   http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/rcx/nqc/
   http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/rcx/pbforth/
   http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/events/
   http://www.lugnet.com/robotics/events/robot-arena/

and see what you think.  Many of these having been in place now for several
weeks, these are the best available indicators of what small focus groups
can be like here.  (The .events groups, BTW, are not yet really off the
ground, but this isn't necessarily bad.)  Here are also the numbers of
e-mail subscriptions to these groups, taken from the most recent stats:

   O      ---|     95    53  lugnet.robotics.rcx.*
   O       --|     47    47  lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos
   O      -= |     41    41  lugnet.robotics.rcx.nqc
   @       - |      7     7  lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth
   O      -= |     44    26  lugnet.robotics.events.*
   O      -= |     23    23  lugnet.robotics.events
   O      -= |     21    21  lugnet.robotics.events.robot-arena

(http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.admin.statistics:239 for more
details.)

--Todd



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: lugnet.trains.org newsgroup?
 
(...) specific and are very roundtablish. What about other groups, such as the San Francisco Bay Area group baylug.org? As you know, we have a domain name now. Zonker Harris seems to want to form a LTC here in SF, which is good and could be it's own (...) (26 years ago, 14-Apr-99, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.trains)
  Re: lugnet.trains.org newsgroup?
 
(...) Well... you know... when you know four times as much about the topic as the next most frequent poster, that happens. <grins, ducks and runs> (...) Shocked, just shocked. (...) I guess that would work. IF people remembered to do it (...) (26 years ago, 14-Apr-99, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.trains)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: lugnet.trains.org newsgroup?
 
(...) Hrmm. I could see where that would be convenient for the clubs themselves with spelled-out geographical description to avoid the alphabet soup for newbies. IMO, if you start .trains.org you might want to consider which groups could also have (...) (26 years ago, 14-Apr-99, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.trains)

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