How to Justify a New Newsgroup
What to Say
If you hope to persuade many servers to carry your newsgroup, you'll have to
offer some numerical evidence that a significant
number of people around the world will be interested in discussing the topic
on the net. Ideally, you should include this evidence in your proposal on
alt.config, and also include this
evidence in the newgroup message which creates the newsgroup; at the very
least, you should include the evidence in the newgroup message, as that's the
thing skeptical news-server administrators are guaranteed to see. The key
words to remember in this regard are "numerical evidence" and
"on the net".
Here are some forms of numerical evidence you might offer to show
that there is significant interest in a particular topic, on the internet:
- Give the volume of related traffic in other (existing) newsgroups
- Give the volume of traffic and/or the number of subscribers in a related
mailing list
- Give the volume of traffic on a related BBS or commercial online forum
- Give traffic statistics for a web page devoted to the topic
- Tell how many people expressed support for the proposal via email or
followups
- Give the volume of traffic or number of participants in a related
real-time forum:
- on an IRC channel
- on a "talker"
- on a MUD which is not equipped to handle non-real-time traffic (if the
mud could handle non-real-time discussions, a newsgroup would be redundant)
What not to Say
A few warnings are in order about what you would be well-advised
not to say in a proposal or newgroup message. There are a
few very old mistakes you could make that will instantly push the "bozo
button" of most news administrators, and will often be sufficient by
themselves to doom your proposal to the low-propagation backwaters of
"alt":
Don't Guess
People running news servers are not going to be satisfied with guesses, and
they aren't going to care how many people bought the book or watched the movie
or attended the convention. What counts is how many people on the
internet have shown interest in the topic. There are, for example,
hundreds of millions of rice and soybean farmers in the world, but very few
of them have internet access; by contrast, there are many hundreds of
specialized computing topics with devoted followings on the internet (as it's
impossible to have internet access without using a computer). Find evidence
to back the claim that there is sufficient online interest in the topic to
warrant a newsgroup, and offer it-- don't offer guesses.
Never Say "Deserve"
No matter how you phrase this argument, it will offend the people you are
trying to convince; deciding whether your topic "deserves" a
newsgroup on their server is their job, and they won't take
kindly to your trying to make that judgement for them. Stick to the facts,
and leave the judgement-calls to the news administrators reading your message.
Don't Compare Your Proposal to a Joke
Many people make the mistake of saying, "alt.joke.newsgroup exists, so
this should certainly exist!". What this argument neglects is
that alt.joke.newsgroup, if it was created after early 1995, most likely has
miserable propagation and no traffic. If that's not what you want for your
proposed newsgroup, don't compare it with alt.joke.newsgroup, because most
news administrators will cheerfully take you at your word on this sort of
thing, assume your proposal has roughly as much merit as alt.joke.newsgroup,
and throw it away without a second thought. :-)