Nan:2007-05-03-comp.windows.news-lcc

From: The Big-8 Management Board <board@big-8.org>
Subject: RFD: remove comp.windows.news moderated (LAST CALL FOR COMMENTS)
Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups, news.groups.proposals,
 comp.windows.news, comp.windows.misc
Followup-To: news.groups.proposals
Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 16:11:36 -0500
Organization: http://www.big-8.org/

                      REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
                        remove comp.windows.news

This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) to remove the moderated
newsgroup comp.windows.news.


PROCEDURE:

The B8MB plans to begin voting on this proposal after five days.  Please
offer any final discussion or comments before the end of this waiting
period.  Voting may take up to one week (7 days); a result will be posted
following the end of the voting period.

All discussion of this proposal should be posted to news.groups.proposals.

The full group removal procedure is documented here:

  http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=policies:rmgroup


SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION:

One comment was received from Andrew Borchert stating, "I am not aware
of any new developments that attempt to create a new NeWS
implementation. The original product is no longer available and it was
also never released into the public. As it appears today, NeWS is only
interesting from a historic perspective and it is not likely that this
will change."


RATIONALE: remove comp.windows.news

The last approved article was in March 2000.  Sun Microsystems
announced the end of life for the Network extensible Window System
(NeWS) in the early 1990's.

During the early 1990's, traffic in the then unmoderated
comp.windows.news was fairly light, less than 10 articles per week. In
December 1995, the group was moderated in place in order to exclude
misplaced articles related to "news" about MS-Windows.  After the
moderation, fewer than 20 articles were approved to the newsgroup.

Because of its name, conversion to an unmoderated status is not
practical.  An unmoderated newsgrooup would be overrun by MS-Windows
traffic (see comp.windows.misc).


HISTORY: 

The unmoderated newsgroup comp.windows.news was created in April 1987,
soon after the Great Renaming.  comp.windows.misc and comp.windows.x
are of similar vintage.

The newsgroup comp.windows.ms was created in November 1988 for
discussion of early versions of MS-Windows.  Because of continued off
topic posting to the other newsgroups in the comp.windows.* hierarchy,
comp.windows.ms was re-organized into comp.os.ms-windows.* in 1992.

Despite creation of an entire hierarchy dedicated to MS-Windows,
off-topic posting continued in the comp.windows.* hierarchy.  The
newsgroup comp.windows.news had the additional burden of a name that
suggested it was for "news" about (MS)-Windows, rather than being
about the NeWS.

In December 1995, comp.windows.news was converted to a moderated group
in order to exclude off-topic discussion, as well as "debate" about
the group name.

Over the next 5 years less than 20 articles were approved.  The last
approval was in March 2000.


DISTRIBUTION:

This document has been posted to the following newsgroups:

  news.announce.newgroups
  news.groups.proposals
  comp.windows.news
  comp.windows.misc


CHARTER:

The newsgroup line is:

comp.windows.news	The Network extensible Windowing System.

The charter (extracted from the CFV for moderating the group):

comp.windows.news is dedicated to the discussion of the Network
extensible Windowing System developed and marketed by Sun Microsystems
during the late 80's and early 90's. Topics include the NeWS server,
NeWS-specific issues relating to the X/NeWS server, the NeWS dialect
of PostScript, and any efforts to produce NeWS-compatible systems.


PROPONENT: 

Jim Riley <jimrtex@pipeline.com>


CHANGE HISTORY: 

2007-04-19     1st RFD
2007-05-03     2nd RFD/LCC