About four years ago, there was a long extended debate on news.admin
about the then-new newsgroup voting procedures and a whole raft of
other procedural matters near and dear to the hearts of a very few
people who happened to be nominally in charge of keeping the network
working. At the time, the online official story about how Usenet
worked ("What is Usenet?") did not reflect all that many of the changes
that had gone on in the intervening three or four years since it
had been written.
So one night I took that old FAQ, kept all the old questions, wrote all
new answers, and posted it out to roughly the same groups right after
the original came out on its monthly cycle. I did this a couple of tiems
by hand (forging approvals at one point to get it into the moderated
groups) until it got picked up for automated distribution.
For what it's worth, "What is Usenet? A second opinion" is now just
as outdated and dangerous as a description of how the network works
as its predecessor was, and I'd like to find someone who disagrees
with me to stage a public debate on news.* to hash out a third opinion.
That, or perhaps it's time to stop posting it at all.
Ed
Edward Vielmetti
U of Michigan, Humanities Text Initiative
emv@dns.hti.umich.edu
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