Newsgroups: news.groups, rec.games.go, rec.games.abstract
Followup-To: news.groups
From: hoey@aic.nrl.navy.mil (Dan Hoey)
Date: 1995/06/07
Subject: Split yes! Rename no! Please keep rec.games.go

Ken Warkentyne <warkent...@di.epfl.ch> writes:

> Rename rec.games.go -> rec.games.go.misc
> The renaming of the base group follows modern usenet convention.
> It does not indicate the relative importance of the various groups;
> it only servers as a marker that more specialized groups do exist.
> The charter will remain as it is, with the exception that postings
> more relevant to subgroups should now be posted there, rather than
> to the main group.

If the charter is to remain the same, there is no call to rename the
group form "rec.games.go" to "rec.games.go.misc".  It causes needless
disruption to do so, and the longer name is just a little more
cumbersome.  You should keep rec.games.go, and just add subgroups.
That has worked fine for sci.math and rec.puzzles, and it would work
fine for rec.games.go.

The only reason the addition of ".misc" seems to be a "modern
convention" is that some of the volunteer advisors on the newsgroup
creation list ask for it to be added whenever someone proposes a group
split, and the proposer usually goes along.  Now that they have gotten
a number of them to go along, they call it a "standard" and try to get
everyone to go along with it.

The "technical" reasons, when you ask for them, turn out to be a lot
of "we think it is better that way" and "some software doesn't deal
with the other way well".  The first is not a technical reason, it's
just an opinion.  The second is a poor excuse for broken software--
they ought to just fix the software, instead of trying to change all
the newsgroups.

I think it's a bad idea, and people should oppose it to prevent it
from becoming even more entrenched than it already is.

Dan Hoey
Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil