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's spool directory. Pleading, cajoling, appealing to good
nature, or paying your news feed generally yielded a better
response than flames on the net.
>PERIODIC POSTINGS
>-----------------
One of the ways to exert control over the workings of the net was to
take the time to put together a relatively accurate set of answers to
some frequently asked questions and post it every month. If you did
this right, the article was stored for months on sites around the
world, and you'd be able to tell people "idiot, don't ask this
question until you've read the FAQ, especially answer #42".
The periodic postings included several lists of newsgroups, along with
comments as to what the contents of the groups were supposed to be.
Anyone who had the time and energy could have put together a list like this,
and if they had posted it for several months running they would get some
measure of net.recognition for themselves as being the "official"
keeper of the "official" list. But don't delude yourself into
thinking that anything on the net was official in any real way; the
lists served to perpetuate common myths about who was talking about what
where, but that was no guarantee that things actually worked out that
way.
>PROPAGATION
>-----------
In the real old days, when it cost real money to make long distance
phone calls to send netnews around the world, some people were
able to get their management to look the other way when they
racked up multi-thousand dollar phone bills. These people were
called the "backbone cabal", and they had a disproportionate
influence on news traffic because, after all, they were managing
to get someone else to pay for it.
More recently, communications costs were (for many sites) buried in with
a general "internet service". If you wanted to have a disproportionate
influence on news traffic, you needed to be able to beg, borrow, buy or
steal access to great big disk drives (so that you could keep a ful
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