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Normally Future Publishing's feeble effort .net magazine doesn't rate a mention. But glancing through a friend's copy I came across something sensible. Recovering from the shock of this discovery I managed to pick my way through the dreadfully cluttered pages to pull some fascinating suggestions out.
The author of the article (whose name I can't find as my friend has gone with the mag!) has highlighted a problem that many people, but especially Internet Service Providers have found. Usenet news is using huge amounts of bandwidth and most of it is junk. The best news groups are moderated, but even those suffer when the moderator goes away on holiday or is off sick.
Demon Internet is the largest ISP in Europe and have had to develop their own software and hardware solutions to keep supplying the ballooning amounts of Usenet traffic, not always successfully as there is just SO much of it! Often their servers overload, and with the most advanced solutions around implemented...
The problem the article highlights is a lack of centralisation.If there was one server for every major newsgroup and three or four minor groups shared a server there would still be about 35,000 servers freed up! This would prevent the needless duplication and waste of bandwidth. But more importantly the server administrators could easily moderate the groups is necessary. This does pose some censorship issuse as it would be easier to control what is said in a group, but Usenet may collapse all together if something isn't done.
