[Xcircuit-dev] Suggestion to open a USENET group for xcircuit and friends

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Svenn,

> now we have a new web site, a wiki, a mailinglist, and I am starting to get 
> hot on a newsgroup on USENET covering the tools that Tim support.

This is okay by me.  However, the more forums I have to canvass, the
more often I miss things, simply because I haven't checked in on one
of them recently.  The email group works best for me, because it's
always in my inbox, and the traffic is less than the average amount of
spam I have to deal with every day.  But I can probably set up the
usenet group essentially the same way.  There are numerous free
newsfeeds that I can connect to.

As for the organization:  If there isn't a "comp.cad.opensource", or
"comp.cad.free", then there should be, and everything else should
go under it, unless there are other open source tools like gEDA that
have newsgroups directly under comp.cad.  XCircuit is definitively
"mine", but others like Magic and IRSIM (and maybe TimberWolf, soon)
are bigger than me, and I can only lay claim to being "maintainer
for the duration".  Or maybe it's just that I think "opencircuitdesign"
is too long to type, and I wouldn't have chosen it except that all
the shorter versions were already registered internet domains.

 > I will not suggest to use any web based forum software as they grow
 > clumsy and have lots of bugs and spam etc. Besides, I do not like
 > forums as I always forget passwords.

The enlightening fact I discovered from putting together the Wiki is
that a web-based anything with universal write access will attract
spam like a magnet, but that pretty close to 100% of the spam is
being generated by the simplest of automated scripts, and is easily
held at bay by simple measures.  All I did to the OpenCircuitDesign
Wiki was to require a password, and then write the password next to
the text entry widget.  I haven't had a single instance of spam
posting since I did that.

					---Tim

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