From: rra@stanford.edu 
  
 Bard  writes: 
  
 > As I recall in the past you have stated the charter is the founding 
 > prinicpal of the group and can not be changed, that the n.a,n 
 > moderator(ss) do not have any scheme or willingness to acept charter 
 > changes (sans at times a re-org). 
  
 n.a.n doesn't *track* charter changes.  There is nowhere, so far as I 
 know, a database of Big Eight newsgroup charters.  n.a.n doesn't maintain 
 such a thing. 
  
 You can't change the thing that's printed in the CFV, no, in the sense 
 that we're not going to go back and edit the archives.  So it all depends 
 on how you define charter.  If you define charter as just the original 
 foundational document that's part of history, then yes, it never changes. 
 If you define charter (as I think people are trying to do in this thread) 
 as "what's currently on-topic for the group," that does change, but 
 there's no formal process for recording the change. 
  
 I'm sure that I've not been consistent in which one of those definitions 
 I've used over the years, since they both make sense depending on what 
 angle one is approaching the topic from. 
  
 One problem area in all of this is the thing that we stick into control 
 messages when they're resent, which right now is just a copy of the thing 
 out of the CFV, but which may give people the impression that we have some 
 sort of charter archive when we don't. 
  
 -- 
 Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)              
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)