G'day Vic,

I'm afraid this response is coming a bit late in the day -- but I did
*start* it nearly a week ago. (Things always intervene. 8-)

In article >,
(Victor Sack) wrote:
>Ausadmin > wrote:
>
>[snippage throughout]
>
>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
>perspective. This is a standard, even elementary, request and the
>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.*
>hierarchy? If so, shouldn't the pertinent parts be deleted from the FAQ
>as no longer relevant?
>
>A reminder: Creation of new newsgroups does not happen in a vacuum -
>other newsgroups may well be affected, rec.food.cooking in this
>particular case. There is little doubt that some valuable traffic may
>be potentially diverted from rfc, thus damaging it, if only very
>slightly. This, in itself, is a good enough reason to oppose the
>creation of any such new newsgroup and the only reason to the contrary
>that is still better is statistical evidence of enough interest in
>recent years in the proposed topic to sustain the new newsgroup.

I thought that one *objection* could be that contributions to a new
Australian group may mostly be cross-posted to r.f.c anyway, and that
would be seen by some as counter-productive. But if the concern is
traffic lost to r.f.c then I'm sure we can arrange a cross-posting
default so denizens of r.f.c don't miss out on Aussie wisdom, and
contributors to the proposed new group don't get flooded out by
irrelevant material. :-) [See Notes below.]

>Some people may ask why such an evidence is important if there is to be
>a vote which will show actual interest in the new group. The answer is
>of course that the vote shows only the current interest, a moment's
>snapshot, which may be influenced by many irrelevant factors. The
>statistical evidence of long-term interest supplements the current one.
>
>Come to think of it, why go through the motions of holding a vote at
>all, then? Just create the bloody newsgroup and if people want to use
>it, they will. What's the use of the aus.* hierarchy at all? The alt.*
>one would be perfectly adequate.

Well if alt.* is regarded as a solution for the establishment of a
new group, then the argument about traffic diversion from r.f.c is
stillborn. ;-)

However, I would regard the alt.* solution as totally unacceptable.
Many corporate and government sites simply ban access to alt.*, which
would cut off many legitimate uses by staff of such organisations (as
well as their lunch time contributions .

>> Other newsgroups that discuss food are completly oriented towards
>> every other country except Australia.
>
>This part of the rationale is not just misleading - it is untrue.
>rec.food.cooking is a global newsgroup and is oriented towards any
>country that happens to be discussed at any one point. This has been
>pointed to the proponent early in the course of the RFD discussion.
>Nothing happened, of course.

While true in theory, it doesn't work like that in practice. Not only
is there a huge amount of totally irrelevant traffic in r.f.c, my
observation is that if you're not part of the established clique you
tend to be ignored. (And I hasten to add that you are in fact one of
the not very many who *do* respond to "outsiders"; and I thank you
for your interest in some of the queries I have raised, for example.)

Notes:

(1) My involvement in USENET over the past 15 years or so has been
mostly in the more technical groups related to computers, botany,
meteorology, and similar; so I am not used to the homely, chatty, and
(to my mind at present) rather cliquey ambience of r.f.c where an
inordinate amount of bandwidth (again to my mind as a result of
previous experience) is devoted to things like "birthday wishes" and
similar "OT" threads. Perhaps such things are pretty normal in the
more "social" groups and, if so, I need to work on my prejudices.

(2) Understandably, there is a *huge* bias to things American in
r.f.c, and that can hardly be avoided when you consider that USENET
originated in the USA with "The Internet" decades ago and by the time
most of the rest of the world had general access to the technology the
World Wide Web had largely overtaken the old text-based discussion
forums. Nonetheless, it can be a bit irritating to others to be
confronted in a cooking newsgroup with so much emphasis on US domestic
issues not in the least related to cooking! For the latest example,
look no further than the "FEMA" theme which has been running in r.f.c
this week. Because of your interest in statistics, I have collected
some. ;-) For the six days 12 to 17 Sep 2005 inclusive (Australian
EST) the main "FEMA" thread in r.f.c has accounted for the following
proportions of daily articles in r.f.c as seen on this server: 90/411,
81/389, 74/304, 80/409, 106/350, and 79/303 respectively. I'm happy
to say that reading online as I do with my ancient newsreader, this is
not a huge issue for me because I can simply skip all the crud; but if
I was one of the many downloading newsgroups to read them offline, I
would be pretty ****ed off with that amount of noise in this group.

(3) Elsewhere it was suggested that traffic in the proposed aus.food
group may be around 2.5 articles/day (IIRC), based on recent stats in
related groups. This motivated me to do a quick google for me in
r.f.c which seems to indicate I have been responsible for jamming
communications around the world to the extent of over 250 messages
here in the past 13 months, or about 0.67 articles/day. So all we
need is someone to reply to me each time and we're half way to that
2.5/day, and that's just two of us. ;-)

Cheers, Phred.

--
LID