NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/news/groups/24813

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-22 | 3.2 KB

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Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin.misc
Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!asuvax!ennews!news
From: [e-mail] (Sridhar Venkataraman )
Subject: Re: PROPOSAL:  Yes votes >= 200+2*No Votes
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: Arizona State University, Tempe AZ
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 04:22:01 GMT
Lines: 59

[e-mail] (Ed McGuire) writes:
)[e-mail] (Sridhar Venkataraman ) writes:
)
)   I can give you atleast 2 examples for groups which passed by wafer
)   thin margins and are far healthier than groups which passed by 400+
)   votes.
)
)There is a direct correlation between a wide vote margin and a
)"healthy group" (if by this you mean high traffic).  Existing groups
)which fail the proposed 200+2*No rule did not appear as often in the
)traffic "top 250" as those which pass; and when they did appear they
)had less traffic.

Hmm.. I should have explained what I meant by "healthy". It is not a
quantitative measure of traffic! Better signal/noise ratio, in line with the
charter, almost nil flaming and just focussed on the topic which the
groups were intended for.

)Why should we ignore this correlation and establish our voting policy
)on the basis of your isolated counterexamples?

I am passing this one because my statement was ambiguous in some
sense and suffered a misinterpretation.

)By the way, I do not mean that voting policy should be based on the
)week's worth of traffic data I used.  I consider those results
)preliminary and will follow up on both high- and low-traffic groups
)when the new arbitron data reach my spool.

With the advent of more and more NNTP servers, I am losing faith in
the arbitron data. I ran arbitron for the machines here and was
disappointed by the results because more than half of the .newsrc
files were unreadable or out of the normal login directories and there
were still lots of people reading news from our server through PCs,
Macs and other mainframes. BTW, I am just another ordinary user and my
only access to news is through NNTP.

)If it turns out that the vote margin is /not/ a good advance indicator
)of traffic, then we should not use it that way.  In that case the 100+
)rule should be abandoned in favor of a advance indicator, such as the
)existence of a mailing list with a certain minimum number of sites
)receiving it.

The 100+ rule as I understand it is mainly to filter bad proposals and
test the need for the group assuming people know what they are voting
for. And this IMO the rule is good at.

Less articles/bytes in a newsgroup doesn't necessarily mean the group
is bad or there are less readers for the group or the group is less
propagated. Infact a mention in Mathias' listing is good enough to
guarantee lesser propagation than it has at present. I would hate to
see a group figure in the same league as alt.binaries.*. I would be
interested in seeing the propagation or a measure of signal/noise
ratio (if ever there happens to be a way to determine it) for the
higher league groups (those which pass a more rigid voting rule).

Sridhar.
--
Sridhar Venkataraman            [e-mail]