Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: eugene@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)
Subject: Re: FAQ
Summary: environment test 2
Organization: NASA Ames Res. Ctr. Mtn Vw CA 94035
Date: 15 Dec 1995 19:49:48 GMT
Message-ID: <4asjgs$dvr@onramp.arc.nasa.gov>

Hey, it worked!

Okay, the group is coming back on line, and we hope to improve the
propagation problems beyond the old 56Kb line which apparently caused
problems before.  Ames has multiple T3s, etc., but I will test some of
the propagation by these messages.

In the future:
I promise to try and get posts out every day (save weekends, I need my
downtime like the rest of you).  The one exception are some commitments
will will have a year from now with the US Antarctic Program where I
hope to get as far away from a computer network as possible and do some
other science for a few months.

I'll do a quick scan for typos (except mine ;^).  Yes, I hope the group
will be fun as well as informative.

And of course, I hope to maintain the parallelism biblio.
An update will be forthcoming next week, and next year it will be Web
accessible sans the old copyright problems.

I have one or two other technical and site related things to work out.


AND OF COURSE: volunteers to help (I thank the two Daves, Steve, and
others) are always appreciated.  And a hand to Rich and the other grad
students who carried the ball after Steve gave it up.


Policy on the signal to noise ratio:
Of course, I will screen all spamming posts.
We want to keep the S/NR high.
I will try not to cut off discussion, but I want to try to work with
posters to avoid problems.  Posts with the specific
	Subject: News Group Maintenance: xxx...
I plan to pass w/o major moderation if we need to discuss policy
(questions like employment ads which I am going to post until people
start to complain).

Encouraging discussion: I leave those mostly to you guys.
Old hands will know that you can't make a horse drink if you lead it to
water.  They will discuss old topics so many times before they get
board with it.

Queries: I'm going to try and insist on followup summaries, etc. when
possible.

For people on the mailing list:
	I, personally, and some of the other volunteers want to
encourage you to transition from email software to news software.
This is specifically pointed to the people in Europe.  Among other
things I plan to experiment with a multipart chained FAQ which if you
don't want to see, you should Killfile.  It will be set up to broadcast
parts every two days.  This is partially to give people a check that
their news systems are working (those people familiar with some of the
other chains realize the value of this (NEWS should never be regarded as
a reliable network application: it is one of the lowest priority
applications on the net).  You will be able to get a sense of that over
the course of a month.  PUSH FOR NEWS SOFTWARE AT YOUR SITE.


