News Service Providers Committee

From Big-8.org

This is a first step toward organizing volunteers to help us cultivate good working relationships with News Service Providers.

Status update (7 July 2010): No progress since 21 December 2006 or thereabouts. The proposal to contact all known NSPs was derailed by anxieties about sending unsolicited bulk e-mail. No other method of engaging NSPs was proposed, other than hoping that they might find this page by accident.

Charter: [DRAFT]

  • Cultivate good working relationships with NSPs;
  • encourage and assist NSPs to honor digitally signed Board control messages concerning the creation, removal, or modification of groups;
  • listen to their concerns and work to resolve them.

Contact address: nspc@lists.big-8.org

Coordinator: Marty Moleski (pro tem)

Members:

Subscribe to NSPC mailing list.

e-mail the NSPC

How to Use Control Messages and Checkgroups

Draft Letter to NSPs 

The following is a draft for the outreach campaign
to let news admins know about the change in 
Big-8 management.  


Subject: Adding and Removing Big-8 Newsgroups

Date: After n.g.p. RFD is decided ...

Dear News Administrator,

On behalf of the Big-8 Management Board, I would like to know if there is
anything we can do to help you configure your news server to automatically
create and remove newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchies, following the
procedures published in news.announce.newgroups.  

Some background: the Big-8 Management Board is a body that runs oversees
the newsgroup creation system for the Big-8 newsgroup hierarchies - comp,
rec, soc, sci, talk, news, misc, and humanities.*.  Our charter is to
create well-named, well-used newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchies; to make
necessary adjustments to existing groups; to remove groups that are not
well-used; and to assist and encourage the support of a canonical list of
Big-8 newsgroups, for use by sites such as yours.  The Board was formed
in October 2005 by the previous news.announce.newgroups moderators - Russ
Allbery, Todd McComb, and Brian Edmonds.  More information, including
policies and membership information, is available at our web site:

  http:''www.big-8.org/

First of all, you're probably asking "why would I do this?"  Most
directly, automating this process will save you a lot of work in the long
run - the rate of control messages for Big-8 newsgroups has increased by
nearly an order of magnitude since last year, and I only expect this rate
to increase in the future.  This will also provide an improved service for
your users, who will learn to [...] (MORE HERE)

So, what are we asking from you?

# We would like for you to configure your news server to either
    automatically honor PGP-signed control messages issued by the Board, or
    to regularly synchronize with the central ftp.isc.org newsgroups list.
    If you need technical support with this, we can try to help you.
    Note that our PGP key is here:

      http:''www.panix.com/~nan/gpg.html

# If any of your customers ask how to create a new Big-8 newsgroup, please 
    refer them to our main website (http:''www.big-8.org/).

# If you are interested in the process yourself, please feel free to follow
    and subscribe to (in increasing order of traffic) news.admin.announce, 
    news.announce.newgroups, news.groups.proposals, and/or news.groups.

# If you are interested in collaborating with other news providers to 
    improve this process, we encourage you to join a mailing specifically 
    set up for news service providers:

      http:''www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=workgroups:nspc
      http:''lists.big-8.org/mailman/listinfo/nspc
  
# If you have any further concerns or suggestions regarding the 
    management of the Big-8, please contact us directly via email at 
    board@big-8.org, or simply by responding to this mail.

Thank you for your time, and we look forward to looking for you!  

{signature undetermined: co-chairs?  NSPC members?  Volunteers?}
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