Return-Path: X-Sieve: cmu-sieve 2.0 Received: from dns.bl.com (dns.bl.com [207.227.241.66]) by stanley.postilion.org (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id g99Kv9Y10935 for ; Wed, 9 Oct 2002 15:57:09 -0500 Received: from proxy.google.com (proxy.google.com [216.239.35.5]) by dns.bl.com (8.12.6/8.12.6/1.36) with ESMTP id g99KvSiX013975 for ; Wed, 9 Oct 2002 15:57:29 -0500 (CDT) Received: from sjdd43.sj.google.com (sjdd43.prod.google.com [10.6.30.43]) by proxy.google.com (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id g99KvMru021668 for ; Wed, 9 Oct 2002 13:57:22 -0700 From: posting-system@google.com Received: (from root@localhost) by sjdd43.sj.google.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id NAA01172; Wed, 9 Oct 2002 13:57:22 -0700 Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2002 13:57:22 -0700 Message-ID: Reply-To: posting-system@google.com To: joe@sfbooks.com Subject: Re: [History] How tale got where he is (was Re: Restrictions...) Errors-To: posting-system@google.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Content-Length: 10246 Lines: 198 From: joe@sfbooks.com (Joe Bernstein) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: [History] How tale got where he is (was Re: Restrictions...) References: <3da105bd$0$187$892e7fe2@authen.yellow.readfreenews.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 144.92.164.204 Message-ID: I'm sorry if this is a duplicate posting. I tried to post it last night (much harder than posting usually is; I jumped through hoops) and got a hung telnet session for my pains; today I see it neither at the posting server nor at Google, so presume it didn't propagate. To add to the entertainment, my attempt to post it last night required me to type the References: header by hand, so it could be threaded just about anywhere... (And still worse, I just found out that pasting my .sig into Google's window stripped the space from the sigdash, at least this time. Arrrggh!) Unfortunately, this post's main reason for being is at least as erratic a situation, concerning some statements in my previous post in this subthread. What's clearest is that at least two of those statements were false. But as a special bonus, this post contains the original voted charter of news.announce.newgroups, posted to Usenet, according to Google, for the first time since the group's first CFV. Wayne Brown wrote in message news:... > Joe Bernstein wrote: > > > gather round, kiddies, while I tell the tale. > > Thanks for posting this, Joe. I wish there was some way to be certain > that every USENET poster had to learn this stuff... You're welcome. Actually, while there's no way to be certain, there's a way to at least *offer* every Usenet poster the chance to learn this stuff. One reason I wrote that post is that the first thing I was asked to write for news.announce.newusers was a post on Usenet's history. I sent last night a counter-offer, saying that I think a good post on history would take a lot of time and I think netiquette still needs doing first. Mind, I'd still *love* to be pre-empted by someone else on the subject of netiquette, and if they write back that I have been, I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief. But I very much doubt that someone else will send in a history of Usenet before I do, given the length limits they seem to want. So this is what the coy opening lines of my post meant: some of the paragraphs in that one were dry runs for something broader than the chronology-history of newsgroup creation that I've already been writing, and that that post was, in general, part of. Meanwhile, I urgently want to post a couple of corrections, and am using this post as an opportunity to do so, so I'm going to quote a couple of things you didn't quote... Alas, even though this post mostly covered periods *much* more recent than the ones I posted about back last winter, I'm *still* not getting corrections from people who were there; these are items I've caught myself. > Joe Bernstein wrote: > > So in the summer of 1989, Woods proposed a new group, > > moderated of course, for nothing but proposals and votes and results, > > and, well, maybe other stuff as it came up, and although I haven't > > yet found the vote result or charter [1], I then cleverly left out the footnote. Sorry! [1] Early posts in na.newgroups did refer to its having a charter. The early posts in general talk about groups having charters as an expected thing, but it isn't clear that "charter" in this context always meant a specific piece of writing, as opposed to a general sense of what a group was for. In any event, David Lawrence has made a charter public, I *think* in one of his newgroups for the group (but I have no way of checking this right now, since I have no access to a computer where I could download and uncompress the control message archive for the group). The way I remember it, this charter was provably not the original one, but it's entirely possible that my memory is making things up. In any event, I find to my horror that I got other things wrong. Damn it, Google just ain't fair. Yes, I had downloaded and chronologised everything Google presented when I looked for the period through February 1991 *in* news.announce.newgroups, but when I searched on "news.announce.newgroups" as a *phrase* - which has been one of my standard techniques, I can't imagine why I didn't think to do it here - guess what I found? > > evidently the group passed; on > > September 4, 1989, news.announce.newgroups opened for business, with > > Woods as moderator. Post <208@m1.UUCP>, dated 1 Sep 1989 20:17:26 GMT, was posted to news.announce.newgroups alone, with Greg Woods's Approved: and Sender: lines. Oh, but it gets worse. I'm not going to list all the rest; suffice it to say that the oldest post I found *this* way, and not taking into account the possibility that Google's unreliable date-presentation has shuffled the posts, is <60913a@philabs.Philips.Com>, dated 5 Aug 89 22:04:12 GMT, also with Greg Woods's Approved: and Sender: lines. On the other hand, in post <3818@ncar.ucar.edu>, dated 28 Jul 89 22:33:54 GMT, Woods says "It will be a couple of weeks before ANYTHING happens", which makes it fairly obvious that the group didn't yet exist *then*. His reason is that until Gene Spafford updated the moderators list the group wouldn't work, which I guess refutes my contention that Spaf had nothing to do with the group :-), and Spafford was on vacation until August 5. As it turned out, Spafford didn't add the group to his list until September 3, but Woods did open for business on August 5 (and had numerous posts between then and September 1); interesting. And *all* of that said, the first CFV is archived; it's message-ID <3577@ncar.ucar.edu>, dated 29 Jun 89 17:19:02 GMT. The name "news.announce.newgroups" is new in this CFV, which is why I don't find older discussion of it. Although it was by *no* means standard for CFVs at this time to contain charters, this one does, and that charter is therefore the voted charter: "This group will contain all new newsgroup proposals (calls for discussion), calls for votes, and voting results. It will contain ONLY calls for discussion, calls for votes, voting results, and possibly an occasional posting of the newsgroup creation deadlines. Other proposals having to do with the newsgroup creation procedure will be accepted if they are in the form of a call for discussion. NO followups will be allowed. Followups will be directed to news.groups, where all discussions will take place. It is intended that all new newsgroup creations will happen via this group. The newsgroup creation guidelines will be changed to reflect this." I note, first of all, that the "present tense is best" meme did not affect the writing of this charter. This is too bad, but is a point of personal pleasure, since I have hopes that I actually was the originator of that meme.[2] More seriously, this is *obviously* not the way the charter was in fact enforced by any moderator prior to the pair of people who I *think* are currently moderating (?). Even Greg Woods allowed things like mailing lists and other hierarchies to be advertised in nan (following his being outvoted in a straw poll he suggested in late August 1989), and Eliot Lear and David Lawrence followed him in this. I'm reasonably certain now that this is not the charter tale has promulgated (if not often), because if that charter had read like this, I would immediately have noticed the conflict. (There were other, minor, "charter changes" voted on or unilaterally announced before tale took over; I don't remember now whether any of them contained actual contradictions of the above text. If memory serves, the 2/3rds rule, which *obviously* didn't modify the nan charter as we would understand it, was discussed as a "charter change".) I still haven't found the vote results, although I do note that a mass ack showed that Gene Spafford had not yet voted but David Lawrence had, late in the CFV period. An author search on Greg Woods shows him still posting as recently as 1999, shows him campaigning to take over the newsgroup creation process as early as April 1989, and shows him talking about the group that became news.announce.newgroups by other names starting in June 1989. But it still doesn't show the nan vote result. The vote total is reported as 213-13 by two later, but not necessarily independent, posts: Bob Sloane in <1992Dec17.113806.45717@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> dated, guess when, 17 Dec 92 11:38:06 CST, and D. W. James in <13920@idunno.Princeton.EDU> dated 6 Sep 91 22:04:02 GMT. Anyway, on to another kind of posting off-topic by the original voted charter: > > Lear ... also > > initiated regular posts noting which groups had been proposed Wrong! Doofus me, posting without checking my materials first! (Though since my materials are all on my isolated home computer, and I post from a library, this is at least understandable doofusness.) Eliot Lear *did* initiate posts tracking votes in progress, but these didn't also list RFDs until the January 21, 1992 post, which was, of course, posted by tale. So this is strictly to tale's credit, and shame on me for giving it to the wrong person. Joe Bernstein [2] Google is being unhelpfully in conflict with my memories here - surely I'd acquired this pet peeve before 1997? And the library is closing. So I still don't know if I get the credit for the present-tensing of charters. For what it's worth, on trying a different search in the morning (charter AND tense AND {present OR past}), the first example of this meme that I can find is my line-by-line on misc.kids.moderated, <5uhusv$cnr@xochi.tezcat.com> dated 1997/09/02. Surely this just means that whoever taught it to me did so using different words, but that's for someone else to find... -- Joe Bernstein, writer joe@sfbooks.com