Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!noao!ncar!woods From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: A SERIOUS DILEMMA FOR THE NET Keywords: Something MUST be done about Portal Message-ID: <718@ncar.ucar.edu> Date: 19 Sep 88 22:46:49 GMT References: <7086@gryphon.CTS.COM> Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO Lines: 27 In article <7086@gryphon.CTS.COM> richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) writes: > >To the members of Usenet: > >Hello. There has emerged, what we feel to be a huge problem. For >a while now, the net has been plagued with postings from several >"people" at the Portal System (tm) in California. >... >If the Site Administrators at the Portal System are still uncertain as >to whether or not they should implement such a thing, perhaps those of >us who feel this way could help them out by assembling as complete a >portfolio of these postings as possible. This is unlikely to work, as it is these "people" who pay the bills for Portal, not us. What we need to do is get their feeds to cut them off, so we can get rid of this crap forever. I for one have *never* seen anything useful come out of portal. As far as I can see, it is a company that is making lots of money off USENET while causing serious damage to it (or allowing their users to do so, which amounts to the same thing). Unfortunately, Portal's main feed appears to be uunet, and there isn't anything in the UUNET policy (as I understand it) that would permit them to refuse service to anyone willing to pay for it, even should we be able to convince them that it is a desireable thing to do. So it would seem that, as long as we have UUNET, the continued existence of things like Portal is an unfortunate side effect. --Greg