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From: peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: News stats to control net abuse
Message-ID: <1665@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Jul-83 01:36:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.1665
Posted: Mon Jul  4 01:36:25 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 4-Jul-83 03:21:47 EDT
Organization: CSRG, University of Toronto
Lines: 41

Thanks to the poster of the news statistics; they provide valuable feedback
to the user community; I'd like to see them done regularly (once a month?)--
the work involved could be shared between sites.

This may well provide a sociological solution to net overuse.  Abusers
are easily identified and will probably restrain themselves.  If they
do not, system administrators will have the information to take appropriate
action.

Anarchy, read as "lack of central control", avoids the CPU cycles and
communications time required to enforce such control.  If feedback
mechanisms exist to regulate overall behaviour, an efficient system can
result.  The net survey provides the feedback, with a pretty low use of
resources.  All "crimes" are automatically recorded and "criminals"
easily identified.  Better still, potential criminals are warned that their
behaviour is bordering on the criminal, resulting in self-restraint.
The "technocratic" solutions proposed by no means guarantee success (they,
too, rely on self-restraint) and will consume substantial resources.

So, regular posting of news statistics allows peer pressure to function to
regulate use of the net, as well as providing system administrators with
indications of abuse at their sites.  However, as abusers and potential
abusers may not read the statistics, automatically generated mail messages
to such people are warranted.  One might, for example, take the average
number of postings by the top 100 or 200 posters and send (polite and
informative) mail to those who posted more than twice the average, with copies
to their system administrators.

All this scheme needs is for some site to compile and post the statistics
and, if mail messages are to be sent, agreement on the criteria to be used
to decide who to send them to.  I don't know enough about the ins-&-outs
of news to handle the statistics, but I'll gather and summarize opinions
on what constitutes abuse of the net, in numerical terms.

A similar solution may work for urging administrators to update their
news programs, particularly if mail messages are sent indicating exactly
how the new version may be obtained and installed.

   peter rowley, U. Toronto CSRG
   {cornell,watmath,ihnp4,floyd,allegra,utzoo,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!peterr
or {cwruecmp,duke,linus,lsuc,research}!utzoo!utcsrgv!peterr