Re: VRML newsgroup?

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Thu, 16 Jun 1994 13:00:24 +0000 (GMT)


On Thu, 16 Jun 1994, Ian Hoenisch N29655 wrote:
> > And maybe the list can be kept as a gateway to the newsgroup for those
> > that don't have access to the newsgroup?
>
> I also agree. I like reading and replying to the list, but I can't
> afford to be interrupted every 30 min by a new mail message. I would
> much rather read the news 2 or 3 times a day. If this is possible, I
> think we should do it.

The weekend after we announced the existance of the list to the world, and
after getting about 4 times as much traffic and subscriptions as we had
expected, Mark and I thought about and decided against taking it to a USENET
newsgroup. Why? Because the goal for the list is to work on and devise a
standard, and to that end the level of quality control and
workgroup-community feel possible on mailing lists is still superior to
USENET. The list isn't about just discussing VR, which is what it'll end up
being on USENET (along with "Hey, I don't read this group, but I'm doing a
paper on VR for my class. Any ideas? It's due tomorrow." style posts)
I'll be eventually bridging the list over to a Web-based conferencing
system I'm working on (a prototype of which sits at
http://info.cern.ch/wit) where we'll be able to have threaded discussions
that don't vanish after your news spool expires. In the short term I'll
be setting up a hypermail archive for this list, which should help things
quite a bit too.

If you have further feelings on this, write to me or Mark personally.
Thanks.

Brian