First general purpose unmoderated newsgroup for Debian
alt.os.linux.debian
Please help in propagating this newsgroup to your favorite news server by
requesting them to carry it.
Let us get it started.
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CHARTER:
For questions and answers relating to the installation and use of different
flavors of Debian GNU Linux (stable, testing, unstable and other derivant
distributions). The newsgroup will be unmoderated.
JUSTIFICATION:
Debian GNU Linux is one of the most popular Linux distributions
(consistently ranked in the top 5-6 distros -
http://www.distrowatch.org/stats.php?section=popularity ). Its user base
probably numbers in millions worldwide. The largest number of derivant
Linux distributions are based on Debian (97 -
http://www.distrowatch.org/stats.php?section=independence ). A survey of
available Debian newsgroups on groups.google.com reveals that there are no
unmoderated newsgroups available specifically for Debian GNU Linux. The
newsgroups in the linux.debian.* hierarchy are all moderated and are
linked to mailing lists via a mail to news gateway, and hence require a
valid email address for users to even post their queries. Though these
lists have heavy traffic, a large number of Debian related posts end up on
the comp.os.linux.* hierarchy every day. These newsgroups (under comp) are
not specifically geared towards Debian and people often get incomplete
advice for their problems.Over the past one year, the number of users
using Debian and derivant distributions like Knoppix has steadily risen
partially due to its highly evolved package management system and the
discontinuation of the personal version of Red Hat Linux. Thus, creation
of this newsgroup would at once be timely and extremely well received.
In this age of spammers harvesting email addresses from newsgroups and
mailing lists (such as linux.debian.*), with spam rising to above 60 % of
total email traffic (http://www.brightmail.com/spamstats.html), ability
to use spam.invalid style addresses in unmoderated genuine newsgroups can
help in alleviating this problem.
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