A band of discontented Usenetters invited the Net at large today to participate in their experiment, an alternative channel for Internet discussion called Usenet II.
"It's time to throw the doors open," said Usenet II topic "czar" Richard Sexton.
The group quietly started their own hierarchy of discussion groups, administered under the root name "net.*", after feeling stymied by efforts to resolve the deteriorating state of newsgroups in the original Usenet. Some members of the original Usenet community have criticized this new effort for its rule-laden, committee driven design.
"Our model is to use rules, not tools," Usenet II steering committee member Peter da Silva said in today's announcement.
"We don't need any special new software," said da Silva, referring to software-based efforts to filter out Usenet abuses such as spam postings. "We feel it is possible to build a community in which users agree upon some very basic rules, and then have the capability to hold each other to those agreements."
Those Usenet II rules center around a "soundness doctrine," one primary goal of which is to lock out sites that become sources of spam postings. Participating Usenet II hosts, such as an Internet service provider that makes a Usenet II feed available to its customers, can be deemed "unsound" by administrative vote.
"A sound site does not allow its users to pollute the shared resource of Usenet," said steering committee member Odd Einar Aurbakken. "A sound site provides content, not noise."
To be considered sound, Usenet II messages originating from each host must have a valid email address in its header (anonymous, but still valid, addresses qualify), a recognized Usenet II site named as a host, and other designated Usenet II markings in its header. The rules are aimed at preventing spam as well as undesirables such as "orphaned" discussion threads.
Usenet II uses the net.* hierarchy, so Usenet II newsgroups are named, for example, net.config and net.media.television. "Czars" are selected to control group creation, and in part to prevent the proliferation of new sub-topics without clear purposes.
The rules are aimed at preventing what some see as fatal problems in Usenet I, including flame wars, abusive discussions, and spam. But the Usenet II group wants to make clear that it is not out to thwart the ongoing success of Usenet I, rather to provide an alternative in those discussion areas where some believe the original Usenet has lost its value.
