Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!rochester!pt!sei!sei.cmu.edu!pdb From: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Patrick Barron) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: USENET constitution (Was Re: Spaf Pro-vote) Message-ID: <1855@aw.sei.cmu.edu> Date: Fri, 10-Jul-87 18:17:16 EDT Article-I.D.: aw.1855 Posted: Fri Jul 10 18:17:16 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 12:30:52 EDT References: <772@hao.UCAR.EDU> <604@nonvon.UUCP> Sender: netnews@sei.cmu.edu Reply-To: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Pat Barron) Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, SEI, Pgh, Pa Lines: 36 Summary: Why? (I removed all newsgroups except news.admin from the newsgroups line) In article <604@nonvon.UUCP-> mc68020@nonvon.UUCP (root) writes: -> True enough, in as much as the current news botch (uhm, er...software) ->doesn't offer adequate flexibility to handle such problems in a reasonable ->fashion. I think the news software should offer a site newsadmin several ->levels of options in handling newsgroups (examples:) -> -> NULL don't carry it, won' forward it -> FEED don't carry it for local readers, but WILL forward it -> CARRY carry it for local readers AND will forward it -> -> Isn't all that difficult to cobble up now, is it? (oh, sorry...except ->for the fact that the almost total lack of documentation in the news ->software, combined with the unGHODly mess it has become through Ghu only ->knows how many generations of patching, makes the damned package virtually ->solid as concrete. Only those who've been playing with the sources for ->YEARS have any hope of making any sense of it) (separate issue, sorry... ->see my flamage in lang.c about coding style and documentation) -> -> Seriously, I see why the admins at certain sites could run into considerable ->difficulty carrying certain types, or names, of newsgroups, due to ->organizational biases. By simply passing them through, without processing ->them to the local user base, this problem is alleviated, while still making ->the groups available to the downstream sites. If I owned a machine, and for whatever reason I didn't want to carry certain groups, it wouldn't be because I didn't want local readers to have access to them. It would be because I didn't want any resources expended on them. Granted, those resources would include the time my users spend reading the banished groups, but they would also include the disk space used to store them, and phone line time used to transmit them to downstream sites. I don't see that having the FEED option helps very much at all. --Pat.