2024-10-19 Message-ID: <vf0ds6$kldt$1@solani.org>

               Request for Discussion (RFD)
          Full pasted Gopher plain text articles

Dear people of Gopher, Usenet heroes and the rest.

This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) for pasting whole Gopher
articles into this gorgeous newsgroup comp.infosystems.gopher

RATIONALE:

On Usenet comp.infosystems.gopher is the practically only place where
discussion about Great Gopher is taking place in English language.
It's calm and relativelly quiet place, but nothing last forever.

To bring some new fresh air, new blood into this meditative
environment and make it the source of daily Gopher news I propose,
that we start to paste our whole plain text Gopher articles directly
into this newsgroup.

While several tools for sharing Gopher articles in Gopher space exist,
they are all "proprietary" and one is at mercy of the master of
particular tool. Usenet is free, open, federated, great channel for
this avenue.


CHARTER:

After Gopher legends will write their wisdoms in their Gopher server,
they will simply paste whole article as it is into this newsgroup.
This will also allow practically every brave Gopher giant have
federated discussion, comments for his Gopher article he will write.
No posting older text found somewhere in the garage of grandpa.
Articles should be recent.

Header:
-------
adding Gopher URI for the article into optional header will be
probably just unnecessary complex and not useful.

Subject: (will be defined after discussion and will be fixed).
--------
Article: <title of the article from Gopher>
Every new pasted article will start with subject "Article:" followed
by space and full Gopher title for particular article.

Body:
-----
plain text full article, verbatim copy of the article from the Gopher
server. Both Usenet and Gopher share similar requirements for
the text, like lenght of line, ASCII character encoding and so on.

Body followed by blank line then Gopher URL of the article on its own
line.

Eventual issues:
----------------
More activity with Gopher links included may attract all evil from the
internet and change this temple into free fish market.
Gopher and Usenet in 2024 is quiet like cemetery compared to other
online spaces, so this issue may be irrelevant from "higher
perspective".

Other issue may appear, that some people will post just links instead
the whole article which can be read directly in the newsgroup.

Normally more adequate would be some alt.gopher newsgroup for this
probably, but based on the numbers of already created newsgroups and
amount of people posting articles in Usenet it may be not so good
idea. This would also create issue, that probably not all Usenet News
servers would propagate particular alt.gopher group and people will be
unable to reach it from their favorite Usenet server. 

IMPORTANT:

Topic of articles should be related to Gopher and Usenet only if this
will take place in newsgroup comp.infosystems.gopher

In case of some alt.* newsgroup it can be benevolent and practically
used as a Gopher feed over Usenet, so any article in the Gopher can be
shared.

DISTRIBUTION:

This document has been posted to the following newsgroup:

  comp.infosystems.gopher

and the following Gopher:

  gopher://morena.rip/

PROPONENT:
Name:   morena
Email:  morena@morena.rip
Gopher: gopher://morena.rip/

CHANGE HISTORY:
2024-10-19 1st RFD.