https://www.big-8.org/w/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=Dave 2026-04-10T02:05:09Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.43.1 https://www.big-8.org/w/index.php?title=Mass_removal_of_groups&diff=1648 2011-01-07T21:51:08Z

<p>Dave: /* Overview */</p> <hr /> <div>==Motivation==<br /> As of January 2011, there are about 1000 groups that received less than one post per day in the last 18 months.<br /> It is not feasible to use the [[Procedure to remove newsgroups|conventional procedure]] for such a high number.<br /> *There have been no independent proponents tackling this problem in the past. It is unlikely that that will change.<br /> *Flooding news.announce.newgroups and news.groups.proposals with hundreds of almost identical posts will do no good.<br /> *Flooding hundreds of groups with almost identical posts will do no good.<br /> <br /> In 2007 the board approved a [[Nan:2007-10-02-low-traffic-result|policy for removing extremely-low-traffic unmoderated groups]].<br /> This policy does not address the crucial issues, though.<br /> <br /> ==Overview==<br /> Stage 1: The proposal will be conducted by the board. The initial discussion to determine candidate groups will take place in private.<br /> <br /> Stage 2: The B8MB posts an announcement containing a list of the groups to be considered for removal.<br /> *The announcement will not contain individual rationales for each group.<br /> *The announcement will not contain charters.<br /> *The announcement will not be crossposted to target groups.<br /> *Pointers to the announcement might be posted, but not to all target groups.<br /> <br /> Stage 3: User feedback for candidate groups. The preferred place is news.groups.proposals. The group lists may be revised during this stage.<br /> <br /> Stage 4: The board conducts a item vote on the final group list.<br /> <br /> Stage 5: If the vote passes the board send the list to the technical team.<br /> <br /> ==Open Questions==<br /> Stage 1: Automatic tools should be used as much as possible. When doing a manual check: it is not necessary that all members check all the groups.<br /> <br /> Stage 2: The format of the announcement should be straightforward: a brief preamble, perhaps with a link to a web page, followed by the list of newsgroups, one per line, perhaps including the tag line. Group charters could be stored in a forest of pages on a web server, if necessary.<br /> <br /> It remains to be decided where to post announcements and how long to wait for feedback.<br /> <br /> [[Category:Group Removal]]</div>

Dave