Mass removal of groups
Motivation
As of January 2011, there are about 1000 groups that received less than one post per day in the last 18 months. It is not feasible to use the conventional procedure for such a high number.
- There have been no independent proponents tackling this problem in the past. It is unlikely that that will change.
- Flooding news.announce.newgroups and news.groups.proposals with hundreds of almost identical posts will do no good.
- Flooding hundreds of groups with almost identical posts will do no good.
In 2007 the board approved a policy for removing extremely-low-traffic unmoderated groups. This policy does not address the crucial issues, though.
Overview
Stage 1: The proposal will be conducted by the board. The initial discussion to determine candidate groups will take place in private.
Stage 2: The B8MB posts an announcement containing a list of the groups to be considered for removal.
- The announcement will be crossposted to news.announce.newgroups, news.groups.proposals and news.announce.important.
- If moderated groups are affected, the announcement will also be posted to news.admin.moderation.
- In any case the Followup-To: will be set to news.groups.proposals.
- The announcement will not be crossposted to target groups.
- The announcement will not contain individual rationales for each group.
- The announcement will not contain charters.
- Pointers to the announcement might be posted, but not to all target groups.
Stage 3: User feedback for candidate groups should take place in news.groups.proposals.
- The group lists may be revised during this stage.
Stage 4: The board votes on each newsgroup individually.
- Available options are Yes, No and Abstain.
- The ballot will start with a summary vote at the top.
- Followed by a list of items (one line per group) where exceptions to the summary vote can be specified.
Stage 5: The board will post the result of the vote.
Stage 6: The board will send the list of groups to be deleted to the technical team.
Open Questions
Stage 1: Automatic tools should be used as much as possible. The board will divide the list of groups to be inspected among its members; it is not required that every board member check every candidate group.
Stage 2: The format of the announcement should be straightforward: a brief preamble, perhaps with a link to a web page, followed by the list of newsgroups, one per line, perhaps including the newsgroup line. Group charters could be stored in a forest of pages on a web server, if necessary.
It remains to be decided where to post announcements and how long to wait for feedback.
