In article <rfgCvut8L.A6z@netcom.com>,
Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg@netcom.com> wrote:
>I have only seen about 3 or four votes so far in favor of changing the name
>of this newgroup to comp.std.x31j6-wg21.  I don't think that is really
>enough yet to start getting serious about making the change.  We need
>more people to express an opinion.

OK, here's an opinion. I think a name change is a bad idea:

1. The new name makes it harder to find the group for people who
are legitimately interested.  Yes, a truly interested person might
eventually find it. Frankly, comp.lang.c++ is so overloaded that
I wouldn't even bother reading the FAQ, though I'd catch it through
reading the list of existing newsgroups if we got a decent description
into it. Such a description might partly defeat the "newbie-proof"
goal since people might just search for C++ groups in the list of
newsgroups.

2. Name changes are a pain due to loss of service and continued
existence of the old group. Many sites take a while to pick up new
groups. My site (and others) have little or no effort allocated to
running news and newgroup message processing gets delayed or even
bit-bucketed. This kills propagation at the beginning. It also
kills contribution. It also loses lots of articles for those on a
site that doesn't adopt the change. Some sites will fail to rmgroup
the old group resulting in continued (mis)use of it. Other sites
will attempt to work around this by aliasing comp.std.c++ to
comp.std.x31j6-wg21 which puts us partly back where we were (since
articles posted to the "nonexistent", but still misunderstood,
comp.std.c++ will show up in the "newbie-proof" group comp.std.x31j6-wg21).

3. The misposting problem isn't that bad. We get far more noise
from legitimate (but not well thought out) posts, posts that should
have been email,  and discussions about changing the name, than we
do from people misposting questions. Furthermore, it is September
and one must always expect a vastly larger number of Usenet usage
and netiquette problems due to the large number of new .edu users.

If a name change were proposed I would vote against it for the
reasons stated above.

Regards,

Rob

In article <rfgCvut8L.A6z@netcom.com>,
Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg@netcom.com> wrote:
>
>I have only seen about 3 or four votes so far in favor of changing the name
>of this newgroup to comp.std.x31j6-wg21.  I don't think that is really
>enough yet to start getting serious about making the change.  We need
>more people to express an opinion.
>

I vote no, do NOT make the change.

I would not mind seeing a moderated newsgroup for news, info, and
reasoned debate.

---- Mark Hollomon

In article <kang.778993080@atto> kang@atto.cs.umn.edu (Liang-wei) writes:
>
>I'm using Visual C++ to develop an application program running under DOS
>environment (not Windows). I meet a problem and still don't know how to deal
>with it. If anyone there knows the method, please help & mail to me to the
>following E-mail address: KANG@CS.UMN.EDU. Thank you very much!!
>
>The problem is :
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Is there any command or method which I can print the data to the printer by
>using C/C++ language?
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have only seen about 3 or four votes so far in favor of changing the name
of this newgroup to comp.std.x31j6-wg21.  I don't think that is really
enough yet to start getting serious about making the change.  We need
more people to express an opinion.

Hopefully, postings like the one quoted above will help to get more people
interested in this issue.

>Please mail reply to me, because I don't check the news often...

Yes.  We can tell.

--

-- Ron Guilmette, Sunnyvale, CA ---------- RG Consulting -------------------
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