On 22/03/2019 23:02, Dan Clough -> David Drummond wrote:

 DD>> Then what is the advantage to Fidonet as a whole to redo our
 DD>> addressing system?

 DC> That's a difficult question to answer because of each person's
 DC> differing idea of what the definition of "advantage" is...  I'll
 DC> try to answer using *MY* definition and reasoning:

 DC> It would amount to what we call here in the US a "spring
 DC> cleaning".  A chance to get rid of the old cruft and useless junk
 DC> that clutters up our houses, and our nodelists.

 DC>  Everybody gets a Zone 1 (or 2, or 3, whatever) address, and by carefully
going
 DC> through that during the re-assigning process, most (all?) of the
 DC> dead/useless entries in there go away.  Now, does that help the
 DC> flow of mail work any better?  Maybe not.  But it's still a good
 DC> thing.  It would simplify the process of nodelist updates and
 DC> distribution.

I guess your utopian view will never eventuate then - for years the US
contingent have been lobbied to "tidy up" their segments - to no avail.

There is some idea amoung some USAmericans that the nodelist in not a technical
document to aid addressing, but rather a memorial document where one can
remember dead curmudgeons (some of whom are best forgotten).

The zone numbers do simplify mail routing - if we were all the same zone we
would have to put an entry in our routing tables for EVERY net to get the mail
to the correct destination - whereas at the moment I can lump all of a given
zone under the one entry "Z:*" to go in a desired direction.

I suppose I could just send everything to the next node up the tree and
perpetuate the NAB's dominance of the whole system...

 DC> If every member of Fidonet was in the same Zone, wouldn't that put
 DC> a stop to the so-called "Zone Wars"?

Have you read "1984"? The proposition in that story was to remove all words
from the language used to express sedition. The theory was that after a while
people would not even have the language to think about
rejecting the bureaucracy.

It didn't work there either. People would still be in other nets, and
expressing cultural differences.

 DC> Yes, a few *C's might lose their titles and that would probably piss them
off, but perhaps
 DC> they could get over it in time.

Surely the RCs would remain, it would be the ZCs that lost their roles?

 DC> Now, I want to make one thing clear.  I have spoken out in favor
 DC> of consolidating the Zones, yes.  But that isn't really the
 DC> central issue here to me.  I can live with keeping the zones the
 DC> way they are.  The original focus of this whole discussion was (I
 DC> think) the topic of how hard it is for potential new Fido sysops
 DC> to get useful information on how to join, and the pathetic shape
 DC> that the web site(s) are in.

Considering that the websites are not part of Fidonet, rather some individual's
view of Fidonet nothing you can do will change that.

Fidonet is not a legal entity - it cannot "own" a domain name. All of those
supposed Fidonet related domains are in fact owned by other individuals, some
of whom have lost interest in Fidonet but still own the name.

 DC>  Let's not lose sight of that.  As far as I'm concerned we can forget
about the Zone thing and try to
 DC> reach some consensus on what can be done to improve the public
 DC> "face" of FidoNet.  That's all I'm really after.

Fidonet is similar to Ham radio in that it is a dying concept populated by some
old "stick in the muds" hanging on to times gone by. As soon as you "modernise"
it to have a fabulous flashy web presence/tech then it ceases to be Fidonet and
becomes just another of the millions of useless websites.

-- 

Gang warily
David

--- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.8.0