Usenet is in trouble. Newcomers must choose an appropriate newsgroup - if one exists - from some 8,000. In addition, the system is easily abused; an unscrupulous advertiser can flood thousands of newsgroups, wasting bandwidth and disk space.
The solution? Get rid of newsgroups. Articles can be kept in one large pool and called up with word searches. To post an article, just throw it into the ocean - the reader's software will fish it out. If you desire a specialty forum, you can create a virtual newsgroup by naming it, as with IRC channels; it will last as long as people use it. Since all posts are kept in one pool, spamming is eliminated.
Sounds far-fetched? The technology exists, and DEC's Alta Vista search engine provides a preview.
- Andrew C. Bulhak (acb@dev.null.org) lives in Victoria, Australia.
