Phred > wrote:
> (Victor Sack) wrote:
> 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.]
Ah, but the crossposting itself would likely generate at least some of
that irrelevant material. As the thread progresses, even on-topic posts
may become irrelevant to one of the newsgroups if, for example, they
start mentioning local ingredients and such. Not to speak of a topic
drift into total irrelevancy.
> 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 
.
Yes, that was my point, in part. Even public ISPs often enough don't
carry alt.*, preferring "serius" hierarchies with "seriously" created
newsgroups.
> >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.
There is more than just a bit of truth in what you say, though I would
still say you are exaggerating somewhat. I've posted a fair bit on the
subject. See, for example,
<http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.cooking/msg/cce434246056011e>
and
<http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.cooking/msg/5bade737c013e8ca>.
Still, how being an Australian (or insert any other nationality if
necessary) excludes one from being "accepted"? And, how can one be sure
the same thing won't happen in aus.food?
BTW, since you were talking about the rfc FAQ in another thread, I
wonder if you know that it had been originally compiled by an American
living in Norway, then almost at once taken over by a New Zealander, who
maintained it for seven years. Then a tandem of an American and a
German took over. Now it is the German only.
And another "BTW"... A few years ago, the rfc Cook.Book was produced.
Here is an excerpt from an introduction:
_______________________
The volunteers named above live in Australia, France, Germany, Okinawa,
and the United States of America. They, along with the many
contributors of the recipes here, are witness to the international
participation that made the Cook.Book dream a reality. Who said we
can't get along with each other?
_______________________
> 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.
No, you are quite correct in your assesment, though indeed such rec.*
newsgroups almost inevitably become more of a "community", with people
getting closer together, often enough even in the physical sense,
organising cook-ins and otherwise meeting in "real life". I've posted
on this, too :-) See, for example,
<http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.cooking/msg/a35aefd21f1e494d>.
How can one be sure the same thing won't happen in aus.food?
> (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.
Yes, but that is just Usenet vandalism. What if aus.food starts getting
similar crossposts from, say, aus.politics or aus.religion?
> 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.
I use an offline newsreader - it is no different from an online one in
this respect. I download only the headers and then select, using
filtering or not, whatever I want to read.
> (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. ;-)
I'll do my best! ;-)
Victor