At 06:41 PM 5/6/99 GMT, Ty Sarna wrote:

In article <199905061620.JAA08391@sam.engr.sgi.com>, I will have to concur with much of what Paul writes here.

2 years ago I attempted to create a new set of newsgroups, which to my astonishment failed. Newsgroup lines: comp.soft-sys.rad.c++.c++builder Programming with Borland C++ Builder. comp.soft-sys.rad.c++.misc Misc. discussion of C++ language RAD tools. comp.soft-sys.rad.c++.power++ Programming with Powersoft Power++. comp.soft-sys.rad.misc Misc. discussion of RAD environments. comp.soft-sys.rad results - 123 valid votes Yes No : 2/3? >100? : Pass? : Group ---- ---- : ---- ----- : ----- : ------------------------------------------- 95 21 : Yes No : No : comp.soft-sys.rad.misc 91 28 : Yes No : No : comp.soft-sys.rad.c++.misc 79 28 : Yes No : No : comp.soft-sys.rad.c++.c++builder 78 26 : Yes No : No : comp.soft-sys.rad.c++.power++ It is an incredible amount of work writing and rewriting the RFDs involved. Once you do get the RFDs written, you must monitor the news.groups discussions about the RFD and participate in the discussion. Kooks come out of the woodworks to battle you. I went thru 3 RFDs (two required), one just to change names to something that throughout all of the discussions was acceptable to most participants. Some you will never satisify. Some live in news.groups simply to cause trouble and to vote no on any proposal. Some believe there are too many groups. I was actively participating in the Optima++/Power++ mailing lists which averaged over 400 members and 40-60 posts per day, when I embarked on this adventure. What got me more than anything was the simple fact that even if I would have gotten no "no" votes, it would have failed simply because of insufficient "yes" votes. :( I didn't even get a good percent of the members of the power++ mailing list. In fact some voted no because they feared losing the mailing list. More than 3 months and lots of hours of time and no results. I do not wish to discourage anyone from creating a newsgroup on usenet. I am a big usenet user, currently subscribed to 27 newsgroups. They are a great source of information and knowledge. I just want whomever to be fully aware of what they are taking on. Usenet is not the only way to go. There are many publically available, corporately sponsored newsgroups. DejaNews carries many. Zippo, who my isp uses, also carries many. Groups such as: borland.public.* microsoft.* symantec.* There will be newservers who won't carry such, but there are several large ones who will. This may be the easiest way to go. Just contact Zippo, DejaNews and such and find out what they required to mirror the newsgroups from a Zope newsgroup server. Just my $s worth. Jimmie Houchin

Paul Jackson <pj@sam.engr.sgi.com> wrote:

...

I had a few suggestions in my message that started this thread. My favorite is:

comp.infosystems.www.servers.zope

But I'm no wizard in such matters, so don't put much weight in this suggestion.

Getting a group in the Big Eight is difficult. There has to be a high level of interest. It takes a minimum of 56 days to go through the process. You'll need at least 100 yes votes, and every no vote is worth two yeses (2/3 majority required, and at least 100 more yes votes than nos).

There will be people who vote no, too. Even those who know nothing about Zope, for a variety of reasons -- everything from the name to to people who will point out that competing software doesn't have groups, and thus we don't need one either.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but you have to *really* want it, and have backing from a lot of other people who *really* want it too. I don't think there is enough support currently to get one through. And if you fail, you can't try again for a minimum of 6 months.

Philip Aylesworth wrote:

How about just a good web archive/search for the mailing list?

I totally agree with this. I would much prefer a good web archive with good searching facilities than a newsgroup. Why should I have to do all the searching on a limited client when a server could be so much more powerful? And in the end I think more we'll get more hits from general web search engines than from Dejanews. Why not build a Zope-specialised *portal* type thing that provides a single search/browse interface to ALL zope info out there on the Net. It could start with this list, and other things like the docs, FAQ etc could get added later. Something like the excellent http://searchlinux.com/ and indeed: http://www.python.org/search/ To extend this point a little, I would LOVE to see this concept abstracted into a generic Product for Zope. I'd like to help with it myself but I'm way too busy with all the other cool things I can develop with Zope! :-) Cheers, Martin -- ### Martin Dougiamas -- Internet Agent "...The Eighties, ### Centre for Educational Advancement the Nineties, ### http://cea.curtin.edu/staff/martin the Naughties."