Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: [History] Is misc.rural moderated? References: <3EC7C95F.1050700@anonymous.com> From: Joe Bernstein Organization: None Supersedes: Date: 23 May 2003 06:50:12 GMT Lines: 125 Message-ID: <3ecdc4a3$0$211$892e7fe2@authen.yellow.readfreenews.net> NNTP-Posting-Date: 23 May 2003 01:50:12 CDT NNTP-Posting-Host: 1b44b01d.authen.yellow.readfreenews.net X-Trace: DXC=D8MGDPaK=fN>Nbb^6h@Z94]efF4TalV:8oii[lAmMK6268g34QnN]< X-Complaints-To: abuse@readfreenews.com Apologies to any who've already seen this, which would include subscribers who read news from Panix or NewsGuy, at least. I have evidence that this post failed to propagate to at least two other servers, including the one from which I post this, and I suspect it also failed to reach the server of the person I was replying to. The only change to what I posted before, after the quotation, is at the beginning of the second paragraph. Subsequently to this post, I posted another reply to this person elsewhere in this thread, angry that ?he had ignored what follows. I apologise for that. However, my attempt to answer ?his surprisingly civil (though still wrong) reply foundered in *yet another* computer crash, and my second attempt is what led to my discovering the propagation problem. At this time, therefore, it makes little sense to me to answer ?him at all until I again have significant free time on Tuesday or maybe Monday night. In the meantime, I'd like to offer a URL in return for the one offered me; although this is part of my own website, the particular spot pointed to is largely a set of references to others' work, with some URLs. On to the repost. This is also a sort of propagation experiment; I'm using Supersedes to see if that has any interesting effects. In article , wildstar wrote: > Once a charter is voted and posted. It is copy&pasted to a .txt file > and stored on a folder. Giving a central location for the charters. > > This was sort of done in the past on things. The crew in the 80s did > that. I started a post quoting this much and contradicting it, but got carried away, and after a while my web browser predictably crashed my computer. (I'm coming to the conclusion that no web browser has ever been written that will run on a Macintosh with System 7 and *not* crash that computer every couple of hours. It's really quite frustrating.) I might've wanted to post the detailed version later, for historical interest, had the useless file-recovery program Panix runs worked, but here's what I *can* say. The word "charter" was never used in an *archived* post to net.news.group, the predecessor of news.groups that existed until late in 1986, to refer to a written explanation in any detail of what a group was for and how it worked. It was used in two other senses that I suspect eventually merged to create the one we're used to: one was to refer to what we call the description line; the other was to refer to the entire stock of lore about a group. For example, by the former sense, news.groups's charter reads "Discussions and lists of newsgroups"; by the latter sense, news.groups is chartered to have a discussion every January of trends in newsgroup creation, and is chartered to be the group to which followups are set for RFDs, CFVs, and RESULTs. In late 1986 and mid-1987, the Great Renaming moved groups from net.* and mod.* into the Big 7 hierarchies. There is definitely no record of written charters being part of this process. I haven't yet done a detailed count, but I'd bet that at least 20 and perhaps as many as 100 of the presently active Big 8 groups derive directly from the Great Renaming; news.groups is, of course, one of these. In early 1987, the inet distribution was created. This is the source of at least 35 and probably at least 50 of the presently active Big 8 newsgroups. So far, I know of only one of these to have acquired a written charter; there may be as many as ten or twenty more, though I doubt it, but at *least* 35 inet groups entered the official list now known as the Big 8 *without* being chartered, of which over 20 were added just last October. The first preserved use of "charter" in news.groups to mean a written document, is a statement by the proponent for rec.food.wine that he would post the "charter" (yes, in quotes) to rec.food.drink shortly, in April 1987. He didn't do so, so I'm not actually sure he did mean a written document. The next is an extremely detailed charter, poorly organised but fundamentally similar to modern charters, presented for a proposed moderated comp.unix.unix-at in perhaps October 1987. (I'm being tentative because Google's dates in the 1980s are not reliable unless you go to "original format", and the particular misbegotten web browser I'm using at the moment for some reason can't *see* the link to "original format".) Neither group was actually created. I found slightly more than forty groups created after the Great Renaming and before February of 1988 (that's as far as I got when the computer crashed), of which I persuaded myself that Google showed something similar to a real charter for one (comp.protocols.iso, I think). I had about fifty or more groups to go before the creation of news.announce.newgroups in August or so of 1989. Since news.announce.newgroups *did* have a written, and voted upon, charter, it's clear that some of those fifty-odd must have too, and probably even some of those are archived at Google. I only got as far as checking one group at the ISC control message archive, which was talk.religion.newage (perhaps the oldest Big 8 group not created in the Great Renaming and not since re-chartered; see the RFD to unmoderate misc.handicap for the other oldest Big 8 group). For this group, three control messages are archived; two are rmgroups (not, so far as I can see, answered by booster newgroups; why not?), while the earliest includes no charter. The archives of news.announce.newgroups's early months include numerous groups being created without written charters, although the overall trend was clearly towards every group having a charter. I don't yet know what the last Big 8 group to be added without a charter was, but I'd bet it was added in 1990-1991. The charter for misc.rural, in particular, is archived from CFVs posted to news.groups, but never appeared in news.announce.newgroups. Basically, I don't have conclusive data, but I'd say that for at least 100 currently official Big 8 groups, and conceivably as many as 300, there is no archived charter known to me, and for many, there's good evidence against the idea that a written charter in our sense existed when they were created. Out of a total of 2200 or so, this is a significant, though not dominant, share of the whole. And in particular, I'd be surprised if we had written charters for even half of the groups created in the 1980s, despite what the previous poster claimed. Joe Bernstein -- Joe Bernstein, writer joe@sfbooks.com At this address, personal e-mail is welcome, though unsolicited bulk e-mail is unwelcome.