Jeff Kell writes:

> Agreed, but there is little I can do from my end.  Our gateway services
>  started out "gratis" from American University and remain there.  As we
>  do not host a newsfeed locally, there is little I can do except rely on
>  their donated services.  Back when their "volunteer extraordinaire" was
>  at American, Jim McIntosh, things ran rather flawlessly.  This has not
>  been the case over recent years.

[snip]

>  Agreed again.  I have never advocated reading the newsgroup to the
>  serious readership out there, the propagation delay is considerably
>  higher than the mailing list.  But granted there are advantages to
>  getting the newsgroup delivery format if response time is not a
>  priority.

>  I have made no changes, and "trust to faith" the gateway functionality.
>  Recently the propagation is extremely slow, so bad that many articles
>  are "expired" by the time they reach some news servers and thus die in
>  transit (in both directions).

Jeff,

Let me apologize for being so long getting back to this topic. The last thing
that I want to do is sound like I'm critical of your good work. Your efforts
on behalf of HP3000-L are substantially under-sung. That compliment and my
gratitude aside however, there some significant benefits to having HP3000-L be
accurately reflected on comp.sys.hp.mpe (aside from providing a convenient
place for spammers to harvest names and e-mail addresses). The most salient of
these are DejaNews and AltaVista. They are excellent archiving mechanisms that
are very easy to use and quite accurate.

I pay no attention to newsgroups that deal with matters such as Visual Basic.
There is simply an inordinate amount of noise on these newsgroups, a
significant portion of which is of the nature "Oh, yeah. So's your
mother"-type of posting. But, on the other hand, these same newsgroups have
simply proven themselves invaluable in putting together QCTerm.

When something has really stumped us, I've simply gone to DejaNews and
starting poking around. I've almost always found precisely the answer I've
needed in less than 30 minutes because someone else asked the same question
three years ago.

If HP3000-L were accurately reflected onto a newsgroup, archiving would be
automatic and there would be no need to self-maintain a local archive whose
location and use may not always be so obvious to the unintiated.

As I mentioned earlier, I subscribe to other listservers that are also
connected to newsgroups. Their delays getting their listserver postings to the
newsgroups don't seem to be much longer actually than e-mail itself.

Thus my question is, what is it that American University (and some of the
other listerserver/newsgroups) are doing that a true powerhouse university
like UT can't? And what can we do to help?

Wirt Atmar