Nan:2007-04-17-comp.sys.amiga.reviews-rfd

From: Jim Riley <jimrtex@pipeline.com>
Subject: RFD: remove comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderated
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware, comp.sys.amiga.misc,
 comp.sys.amiga.reviews, news.announce.newgroups, news.groups.proposals
Followup-To: news.groups.proposals
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:09:58 -0500
Organization: http://www.big-8.org/

                      REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
                     remove comp.sys.amiga.reviews

This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) to remove the moderated
newsgroup comp.sys.amiga.reviews.


RATIONALE: remove comp.sys.amiga.reviews

The last approved review was in January 2000.  Posting of review
standards, indexes, and other administrivia continued until July 2000.
Prior to the last approved review, there had been a gap of 12 months
between reviews, and over the final few years of activity, months with
no reviews were more common than months with reviews.

In response to an e-mail inquiry, the last moderator of the group
wrote, "there's no reason to keep the newsgroup -- it's long dead."

Most of the groups of the comp.sys.amiga (CSA) hierarchy have
extremely low traffic, with the exception of CSA.advocacy, CSA.games,
CSA.hardware, and CSA.misc, all of which average less than 5 articles
per day.  Reviews of hardware, software, and games may be posted to
the unmoderated groups and discussed there.

Removal of the group would have no effect on the archive for the group
located at http://math.uh.edu/~barrett/reviews.html .


HISTORY:

The newsgroup comp.sys.amiga.reviews was created in January 1991, as
part of a re-organization of the comp.sys.amiga (CSA) hierarchy that
created CSA.advocacy, CSA.announce, CSA.applications, CSA.audio,
CSA.datacomm, CSA.emulations, CSA.graphics,  CSA.introduction,
CSA.marketplace, CSA.misc (renamed from comp.sys.amiga),
CSA.multimedia, CSA.programmer (renamed from CSA.tech), and
comp.unix.amiga.

The CSA hierarchy had its origin in the creation of net.micro.amiga in
August 1985, followed by creation of mod.amiga, mod.amiga.binaries,
and mod.amiga.sources in May 1986.  The Great Renaming in 1987 merged
net.micro.amiga and mod.amiga into the unmoderated comp.sys.amiga, and
merged mod.amiga.binaries and mod.amiga.sources into
comp.sources.amiga.  comp.binaries.amiga was added in May 1987.
comp.sources.amiga and comp.binaries.amiga were removed in July 2007
and October 2007, respectively.

CSA.tech (later renamed CSA.programmer) was created in April 1988.
CSA.hardware was created in January 1990, and CSA.games was created in
August 1990, before the re-organization that created 112 new groups
and renamed two others.  CSD.networking and CSA.uucp were created in
January 1994, followed by CSA.cd32 and rec.games.video.cd32 in April
1994.  The final group in the hierarchy, CSA.morphos was added in
December 2001.

During its first two years of its existence, reviews averaged about 5
per month, though this was somewhat sporadic.  In 1993 and 1994, there
were were roughly 10 to 15 reviews per month.  This declined to 2 to 3
per month in 1995 and 1996.  Over the final 3 years of activity 1997
to January 2000, reviews became increasingly infrequent, with reviews
only posted in 9 of the 37 months.

A summary of review activity is available at
http://math.uh.edu/~barrett/data/new/Statistics

The last review was posted in January 2000, with posting of
administrivia continuing until July 2000.


CHARTER:

The newsgroup line is:

comp.sys.amiga.reviews	Reviews of Amiga software, hardware.

The charter (extracted from the monthly posting to the group):

This is the "review column" of the Amiga computer newsgroups,
featuring readers' reviews of hardware, software and other products
for the Commodore Amiga family of computers.


PROCEDURE: 

The full group removal procedure is documented here:

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

Those who wish to comment on this request to remove this newsgroup should
subscribe to news.groups.proposals and participate in the relevant threads 
in that newsgroup.

To this end, the followup header of this RFD has been set to 
news.groups.proposals.

All discussion of active proposals should be posted to news.groups.proposals.

If desired by the readership of closely affected groups, the discussion
may be crossposted to those groups, but care must be taken to ensure that
all discussion appears in news.groups.proposals as well.


DISTRIBUTION:

This document has been posted to the following newsgroups:

  news.announce.newgroups
  news.groups.proposals
  comp.sys.amiga.reviews
  comp.sys.amiga.misc
  comp.sys.amiga.hardware

The proponent will also post pointers to:

  comp.sys.amiga.announce (moderated)
  comp.sys.amiga.games
  comp.sys.amiga.advocacy


PROPONENT: 

Jim Riley <jimrtex@pipeline.com>


CHANGE HISTORY: 

2007-04-17     1st RFD