[Joe], Not his real name.
I am writing this to you because I can see that you took it upon yourself, as is your right, to cancel the group that I am trying to start, alt.support.psoriasis. I do not know your deepest motivations for doing this.
Allow me to explain how I see things: I have psoriasis. It is an unpleasant skin disease that causes very dry flaky skin. It itches, burns and looks ugly. I would not wish it on anyone. The National Psoriasis Foundation estimates that there are approximately three million people in the United States with psoriasis. It is found to some degree in almost every country and culture on this planet. Whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians get it. (Interestingly it has not been found in Eskimos and some South American Indians.) This is all to say that it is quite common. I have it to the degree of having some patches on my torso, legs and elbows. You would not know it from seeing me dressed at work. I say this to illustrate that you probably come in contact with people that have some psoriasis that you not aware of. It is not a rare disease.
Of course you know how fast the internet has grown and that many people from all over the world are participating. When you combine this and the numbers I have given you for the amount of people with psoriasis, I think that you can see that there is quite a potential for a group devoted exclusively to psoriasis. I have contacted the National Psoriasis Foundation (NPF) and they have told me that they would be happy to publicize the group in their news letters that are mailed out to 35,000 people (a small percentage of the people affected). This will probably bring a lot of people in to the group.
I take it that your objection to this group is not so much that it is too specific. If that was your objection you would be sending out a lot more cancel messages for groups much more specific. I think you saw two or maybe three messages that suggested that the group be more generally named, alt.support.skin-diseases. And you probably thought I was doing something wrong not listening to those two or three people. Please keep in mind that they are only a few people with opinions that may or may not be particularly well thought out. If you are recalling that you saw more suggestions for the alt.support.skin-disease name than the alt.support.psoriasis name, you are right. If those opinions were considered votes it might be 3 to 2 (5 total) for alt.support.skin-disease. But also keep in mind that the alt groups were set up to be different from the big seven. In the comp, misc, rec, etc. newsgroups, a very formal voting procedure has been set up. The alt groups were set up to NOT require this. Alt.config is a place where ideas can be bounced around. There is no formal voting procedure, no formal debating. Those five opinions were not votes. And the term consensus is probably pointless when talking about 4 or 5 people among the thousands who read alt.config.
You may wonder why I don't want to listen to those two or three others who recommended the more general category. Once again to get personal, psoriasis can be an all encompassing problem for some of us. When it is, it is quite likely that those people with it, don't want to hear about someone else's acne, or athlete's foot. Not so much because we don't care; but rather it is because we are looking for cures and coping strategies from other people with the same disease. What works for acne certainly doesn't work for psoriasis. So I think, that people with the disease would want to stay focused on just that disease.
[Joe], I have written this to you in hopes that you can understand a bit of my thinking about this.
Thanks,
krauster@quake.net
P.S. Digging through some correspondance I found a message from the guy who proposed the
alt.support.skin-diseases topic after he had read my alt.support.psoriasis message. I have
pasted it in below.
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P.S.S. I would also suggest if you have the time, to check some of the postings that are coming in on the servers that are not dropping the group. People have been very appreciative that this group has been started. It is not a joke.
I hope you can understand this. Please feel free to contact me and if you want to start a group alt.support.skin-diseases I will be happy to support you in anyway.
Thanks,
Steve
Pardon the heavy snipping of your message; I'm just going to quote the stuff I directly respond to, to save on message size.
steve grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
My motivation is purly alt creation guideline (I.E. consensus, in this case), and directory naming (for news spools the world over). I have no personal interest in the subject at all.
Yes, I'm aware of that.
This is true. But a consensus reached through those that reply is the "consensus reached," for "practical" purposes. Yes, alt was created to be different than the Big Eight (yes, a new top level "Big" group was officially created :), but that doesn't change the need for maintaining a structure of sorts, if for no other reason than news spool directory space (as I already mentioned).
I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with your assessment as to where it should be. Psoriasis *is* a skin disease, right? If you think that such a group name is too generalized for your needs and that psoriasis-specific messages will be volumous enough to warrant a group specifically for it, why not use/create alt.support.skin-diseases.psoriasis instead? That way, you've created the group you want, while allowing for expansion, should other skin disease support groups want newsgroups to cover the topic.
I know that. I hope you noticed that none of my rmgroups for it contained "joke group" in them.
What I want is to see something named in a way which best promotes future expansion that doesn't add to namespace waste. I hope you will consider this. I wish you had considered it before newgrouping it....
I'm open to further discussion, if you want.
--Joe
[Joe],
I appreciate the logic of alt.support.skin-diseases.psoriasis (ASS-DP). Had I to do it over again I would call the group that rather than alt.support.psoriasis (ASP).
As you may remember (I hardly do at this point and the postings are gone from my site) no one ever recommended this. I posted my intent to make ASP. Somebody came back saying it might be better to do alt.support.skin-diseases (ASS-D). Somebody else came back with a very ambiguous support of ASS-D making me believe that they might not have even read my first posting about ASP. I interpreted another posting that was a response to the third posting that way also. In hindsight I should have put more attention in to trying to have them clarify their positions and I should have been active in opening the discussion up to more people with good ideas. It would have saved us alot of time. Maybe someone would have recommended ASS-DP and I would have thought that a fine idea.
But alt.support.psoriasis, while not fitting into a potentially neater hierarchy is not inconsistent with by far most newsgroup names in the alt.support category. With only a few exceptions are people breaking the groups into four levels when possible. -- [Joe], I hate to use the -he did it, so can I- defense, but....
Consensus reached in the alt.config category is a very muddy concept for me. I understand how voting can work with a formal structure and somebody in charge. But consensus in this format is not even close to the same and we are not voting. I don't think that consensus ussually can or need be achieved. The guidelines that I have read during this process recommend proposing names to alt.config mostly to 1) get suggestions and tips from others with experience and 2) to give the news administrators that don't completely automate their newgroup and rmgroup processing, some information when making the decision to carry or drop a group. Consensus is a goal but may never be achieved and I don't interpret the stuff I've read to say that it must be. I should have worked harder to build a consensus. To my minor credit I did contact the guy who sent the first ASS-D message and his reply, as you can see in my previous letter showed he would support alt.support.psoriasis.
At this point I could send out another newgroup message to start alt.support.skin-diseases.psoriasis. And then I could also post to alt.support.psoriasis and suggest that everybody move over to ASS-DP but as you know that will not make for less groups at this point. Maybe over time the sites that don't process your rmgroup messages would eventually drop the possibly empty ASP group, but most likely not. There might still end up being traffic in ASP.
So this was a minor (in my opinion) and typical screwup because I have not been using newsgroups for very long. Does it make scanning by eye through a complete listing of groups a bit harder to find things without the four layered structure? Yes. Does it add to the potential newsgroup proliferation problem? No. Whether the group had been named alt.support.psoriasis or alt.support.skin-diseases.psoriasis, there still would be a group just for psoriasis as I'm pretty sure (allow me to indulge in the typical group creator's optimism) the traffic in the group will grow to warrant it.
Thanks for your time,
Steve
P.S
The following is not politicing or trying to convince you of anything. I have a naive question. Seeing as it appears to be as easy to send out a rmgroup message as it is to send out a newgroup message, how come demented hackers or people with real big axes to grind don't send out tons of rmgroup messages everyday driving the whole thing into chaos? (I don't mean to imply you do this. Your letter convinces me of a sincere wish to try to keep the newsgroups in order). I could imagine some religious groups waging campaigns against everything in alt.sex.*, sports fanatics destroying the opposing team's newsgroups and hormone crazed teenagers trying to kill everything. Besides the mechanism that many sites don't process the rmgroup message, what else is going on?
steve grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
It's not too late to "fix it." :-)
When I went back, looking through the thread, I did notice a lack of anyone mentioning the structure that I told you about. And growled about it. :-) I wish *someone* had reached that conclusion between the two names mentioned....
"Stupid group A exists, so why can't I have stupid group B" is not a valid reason for the creation of a newsgroup. If you've spent any time at all reading the posts from the alt regulars, you *know* that is going to be their response to *that* argument. :-) Just because part of it is bad doesn't justify adding to the problem.
It *can* be muddy at times, agreed. :-)
That would have been good, yes.
I still wish that someone had realized that merging both, as I suggested, would have been the best solution. Oh well, what's done is done. Time to see if it can be fixed.
That's usually the case, which is why the alt.config regulars often come down so hard of some of the suggested names that turn up from time to time. However, over time, superseded newsgroups do drop to the point where they do finally get dropped on most sites. The time to act on it is now, not later. The best thing, IMHO, that you could do would be to newgroup the new, better name (remember, my complaint about the group is not a lack of perceved need, just the name structure :), and send out a rmgroup for the old one, asking News Admins to either drop it or alias it to the new group name, since the new name allows for expansion of the topic at large, etc (and of course, sending a message on the group asking the readers to move to the new group). It will take some time, but eventually, you'll have the bulk of traffic in the new group.
I don't doubt that there will be enough traffic on the subject to warrant its own group. I'm just strongly in favor of naming it something a little better. :-)
--Joe