From Newsgroup: news.announce.newgroups

This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) to remove the following unmoderated newsgroup.

comp.unix.user-friendly


DISTRIBUTION:
news.announce.newgroups
news.groups.proposals
comp.unix.misc
comp.unix.user-friendly


PROPONENT: Marco Moock <mmoock@big-8.org>


RATIONALE:

Last activity in 2009
If there is need for discussion, more general groups can be used.


DISCUSSION SO FAR:

Discussion took place primarily in news.groups.proposals with some
further posts in news.groups. Responses were received in the threads
"RFD: Remove comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc and comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc" (in news.groups.proposals) and "RFD: Remove comp.unix.user-friendly" (in news.groups.proposals and news.groups). No responses were received in
the thread "RFD: Remove comp.unix.sys5.misc and comp.unix.sys5.r4".
However, all of the points raised could be applicable to any of the five newsgroups currently under consideration, and therefore we have collated
all of the responses into a single summary covering all five groups.

Computer Nerd Kev argues that it is better to have separate newsgroups
to discuss old platforms, as some users in the more general groups may
not welcome discussions of old unmaintained software.

Julien +LIE supports the proposals but suggests that a mass deletion of
unused groups would be more efficient than removing groups a few at a
time.

Jesse Rehmer and ReK2 Hispagatos believe that a long list of newsgroups
where many have had no traffic for years is discouraging for new users
and makes it hard to find relevant groups.

Computer Nerd Kev and Winston both note that they personally subscribe
to groups with no traffic, and therefore lack of activity is not
necessarily an indication that nobody has any interest in the group.

noel, sticks, yeti, and DrunkenThon all expressed concern that removing
the groups would also remove valuable historical discussions associated
with those groups. Scott Dorsey countered that news service providers typically do not guarantee that old posts will remain available
indefinitely in any case, and an archive server should not remove old
posts if the group no longer exists. Todd McComb suggested that it would
be more productive for anyone concerned about the availability of
historical posts to direct their efforts at improving the state of
Usenet archiving.

Adam Kerman and Steve Bonine both consider the proposed changes a "make-
work" activity that achieves nothing useful.


GROUP:

comp.unix.user-friendly
Discussion of UNIX user-friendliness

Charter:
UNIX has a reputation of being unfriendly for non-programmers - making
it difficult to use by those who need not know Unix, such as the
average user in the commercial business world. This group would be a
forum for discussion about UNIX user-friendliness and the availability
of user-friendly software for UNIX.

Presently, the above is done on an ad-hoc basis on a number of groups
such as comp.editors, comp.unix.questions, etc. Posts presently
asking about user-friendly utilities/software for UNIX usually attract
some flamage and seem out of place in these groups, because of
non-obvious differences between friendliness of Unix towards
programmers and unfriendliness towards non-programmers. This group
would give non-programming users a forum where their type of "user-friendliness" is meant to be the norm, not the exception.

The following would be considered typical for this group:-

- To clarify definitions like "user-friendliness" for the relevant
groups of users.
- Discussion about what user friendly software (editors, utilites,
etc) are available for UNIX.
- Discussion/opinions about ways of making "default" UNIX user setups
more user-friendly.
- Announcements of new "user-friendly" software and utilities.
- Discussion on how UNIX and UNIX software could be made more friendly
without endangering the work methods of the Unix programmers who feel
Unix *is* already friendly for them.
- Discussion on what makes a particular part of UNIX or UNIX software
so unfriendly/friendly, and for which subgroup of users.

History:
comp.unix.user-friendly is an unmoderated newsgroup which passed its
vote for creation by 280:87 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on
27 Sep 1993.


PROCEDURE:

Those who wish to comment on this request to remove this newsgroup
should subscribe to news:news.groups.proposals and participate in the
relevant threads in that newsgroup.

To this end, the followup header of this RFD has been set to news.groups.proposals.

All discussion of active proposals should be posted to
news.groups.proposals.

If desired by the readership of closely affected groups, the
discussion may be crossposted to those groups, but care must be taken
to ensure that all discussion appears in news.groups.proposals as
well.

For more information on the newsgroup removal process, please see https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Removing_newsgroups


HISTORY OF THIS RFD:

2025-10-10: 1st RFD (remove)
2025-11-15: 2nd RFD (remove)
--
Usenet Big-8 Management Board
https://www.big-8.org/
board@big-8.org

--
Usenet Big-8 Management Board
https://www.big-8.org/
board@big-8.org

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