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