snail > wrote:

> Victor Sack > wrote:
> > I notice that there has been no reaction to my request to provide an
> > estimate of expected traffic for the proposed newsgroup and the current
> > traffic on the net related to this topic, i.e. food from an Australian
>
> ISTR some discussion, and stats quotage, a couple of months ago,
> probably in the pre-RFD period.

*Please* post the evidence!

> > reasons for it are well explained in the aus.* FAQ. Yet no estimate has
> > been forthcoming. Is this no longer of any importance in the aus.*
>
> I don't have time to google at the moment, but some some references
> should come up.

*Post* them, please, or ask someone else with more time on his hands.

Really, I would like nothing better than to see some honest statistical
evidence of real interest over the recent years. That would take care
of the whole problem, as far as I'm concerned. It is one thing if there
are, say, at least five posts a day on the relevant topics, and quite
another if there are perhaps only a couple posts per month.

> > it, they will. What's the use of the aus.* hierarchy at all? The alt.*
> > one would be perfectly adequate.
>
> Now that's just insulting.

Well, it was meant to be more facetious than insulting, but insulting
wouldn't be at all out of place, either. The difference between alt.*
and aus.* (and other ostensibly "serious" hierarchies) is some standards
of new group creation. One of these standards, evidence of the
viability of the new group, is lacking in this case, making the aus.*
effectively equivalent to the alt.*

I would say that anyone with even a bit of respect to the aus.*
hierarchy, or at least to what it is supposed to be, ought to vote NO on
this proposal, if only out of principle. The whole thing is really not
just about this one proposed newsgroup - one has to take a larger view.
Is this all only about the instant-gratification, me-generation people
who demand the new group *now!* because that's what a few of them *want
now!*, or is the whole aus.* thing perhaps worthy of some more concern?
Just asking... in this case *my* concern is mostly rec.food.cooking...

FWIW, another, better, proposal can be made in a few months time, I
imagine, if this one fails for some reason. It is not as though people
are prevented from having what they want for the eternity.

> That doesn't mean newsgroups
> in aus.* should be created willy nilly, however there has
> been quite a bit of a discussion on this proposal and seems
> to have a fair bit of support.

What discussion? Mine was the only criticism at all, as far as I can
see - and it was totally ignored.

Victor