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From: shannon@sun.uucp (Bill Shannon)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: handling of moderated newsgroups in 2.11
Message-ID: <10428@sun.uucp>
Date: Sun, 14-Dec-86 02:46:41 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.10428
Posted: Sun Dec 14 02:46:41 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Dec-86 01:51:14 EST
References: <9732@sun.uucp> <2476@diamond.Diamond.BBN.COM> <9781@sun.uucp> <1354@munnari.oz>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 86
Summary: The point is, the new scheme is less flexible

In article <1354@munnari.oz>, kre@munnari.oz (Robert Elz) writes:
> In article <9781@sun.uucp>, shannon@sun.uucp (Bill Shannon) writes:
> > Our local moderated groups are fed by a mail alias that uses recnews.
> > There is no real moderator in the loop.
> 
> Huh?  Why?  If there's no moderator, how can this group possibly
> be a moderated group.

Because I don't want to allow direct posting to the group.  There is
no human moderator, but there is a program performing the function
of a "moderator".

> I guess what you really mean is that you want to force people to
> mail things to the group list, rather than just posting them,
> but again, why?

Why not?  I used to be able to, and it worked just fine.  Why am I now
restricted in the way I can post to local newsgroups?

I think I've explained this in other messages, but the reasons for not
allowing people to post directly to a newsgroup are more administrative
than technical.

> The only possible explanation I can think of is that you have
> some people who want to treat the group as a mailing list,
> getting info from it by mail, and replying by mail, and others
> that want to treat it as a newsgroup.

Exactly.

> An easy way to do that is ..  (assuming your group is sun.bugs so
> I have a concrete name)
> 
> In the sys file
> 
> SunBugs:world,sun.bugs::mail SunBugsList
> 
> In your aliases file
> 
> SunBugs: SunBugsList, "|recnews sun.bugs"
> SunBugsList: user1, user2, ...
> 
> If you do this, people can mail to SunBugs, or post to sun.bugs
> and everyone who's supposed to get a mail copy will, and the news
> will be available as well.

Yes, I think that will work.  However, we have *a lot* of mailing lists,
many of which I would like to "gateway" into newsgroups.  I have no
control over our aliases file, so I can not simply go in and edit each
such mailing list to reorganize it as you suggest.  What I can do is
request that a new address be added to existing mailing lists, so that
I can siphon off mail to the list and send it to a newsgroup.  If I
could then simply tell news to send postings back to the mailing list,
my gateway would be complete without loops.  This is the technique I've
used for quite a while before 2.11.

> Please, DON'T "fix" recnews to add approved headers.  "Approved"
> should mean "approved by the responsible human", not "mailed
> to a magic address".

Ok, fine, so give me a way to use recnews to post news to a local
moderated newsgroup without it needing to be approved.

> Robert Elz			kre@munnari.oz
> 
> ps: for those who care, precisely this kind of change is going to
> happen to the "mod" groups that really aren't moderated (like
> mod.computers.vax, and others).

Exactly what kind of change?  In addition to the local moderated
newsgroups that I want to make work as before, there are several
non-local moderated groups that are not handled at all well by the
new scheme.  If you ever read mod.computers.apollo you'll see lots
of submissions with a Subject of "Submission for mod.computers.apollo".
Pretty useless.  If the people running mailing lists such as
mod.computers.apollo refuse to accept USENET postings into the mailing
list, then we will need a much better scheme to allow mailings to the
mailing list instead of postings to the newsgroup.  This used to be
handled by the moderated newsgroup support.  If you'd like to add support
for yet another type of newsgroup (a "mail" newsgroup?) that doesn't
require approval to post to it from recnews, but forces all postings
from postnews, followup, etc to be mailed to a certain address (but how
does it know where the posting is coming from?), that's fine with me.
Just give me a way to do what I always used to be able to do.

					Bill Shannon