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 not contain individual rationales for each group.
- The announcement will not contain charters.
- The announcement will not be crossposted to target groups.
- Pointers to the announcement might be posted, but not to all target groups.
Stage 3: User feedback for candidate groups. The preferred place is news.groups.proposals. The group lists may be revised during this stage.
Stage 4: The board conducts a item vote on the final group list.
Stage 5: If the vote passes the board send the list to the technical team.
Open Questions
Stage 1: Automatic tools should be used as much as possible. When doing a manual check: it is not necessary that all members check all the groups.
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 tag 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.
