Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 09:57:12 -0500 From: Tim Skirvin To: [suppressed] Subject: Re: The Future of UIUC Usenet Message-ID: <20030903095712.I2288@killfile.org> Reply-To: tskirvin@killfile.org [Executive summary: we should meet at 6pm on Monday at The Office in downtown Urbana to discuss things further. Tell others.] > > If you're interested in the future of Usenet at UIUC, please > >contact me. I'm trying to do something about it, and would like to talk > >with anybody that feels they have a stake in it. Okay, this seems to be the response I'm going to get, at least right now... So let's go over what I've got. A couple of weeks ago, I sent a mail to usenet@uiuc.edu, asking if I could "have permission to try to keep it [uiuc.*] alive on campus and non-campus news servers". My details were sketchy so I didn't include them; I didn't figure I'd get much of a response anyway. Apparently I was wrong; I got a response from Sue Lewis about a week later, asking to set up a meeting to talk about my "running a Usenet server." The meeting's been scheduled for the 22nd, so I have that long to get everything in order and decide exactly what I'm asking for. What I minimally want out of this is to at least put out an effort to save uiuc.*, specifically the social parts. There isn't anything at all out there to replace groups like uiuc.org.*, and there isn't anything *good* to replace a lot of the rest (uiuc.general, uiuc.rha.*, uiuc.sys.*, uiuc.soc.*, uiuc.test, and so forth). What this will really entail is setting up all of the future/potential campus news servers to have and share a consistent set of newsgroups across them, along with some basic policies to minimize abuse and redistribution. What I would *really* like for there to be at least one news server on campus that continues to distribute every major newsgroup that anybody would find of interest - the Big-8, alt.* minus the binaries groups, some of the more esoteric hierarchies, maybe even Usenet II and bofh.*. I've gotten pledges of newsfeeds from sites that we talk to over Internet2 (and therefore the bandwidth is free), and offers to run servers from several departments. And, of course, the absolute ideal would be if someone were to fund CITES enough to keep their news server running, preferably with a hardware, software, and administrative overhaul. Spam filtering at the server level, a sensible newsgroup creating policy, allowance for other sites to run news servers as well, good moderation facilities - all of these things would be wonderful. What I don't want is the model currently being set by the CS department: a small number of newsgroups being stored on each server, each of which has to be separately authenticated. It will solve its limited purpose of offering class newsgroups, yes, but it won't last - it's like offering a web browser where you can only go to three sites, and everything else is blocked out. Besides, not all news readers will do the authentication, including the one I'm most fond of (nn)... So, where you guys come in: we need to get an actual proposal put together. This first of all is going to require us to decide on what *exactly* we're asking for. I suggest that we meet at The Office on Monday at 6pm (it's not too smoky or loud at that hour). Oh, and if any of you are planning on running news servers, I'd like to talk to you separately anyway... If nothing else, I probably have a good amount of advice on the server itself. - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org) -- http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/ Skirv's Homepage < <*> http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/pics/ Skirv's Pictures