Path: utzoo!yunexus!maccs!lsuc!tmsoft!dptcdc!bar From: bar@datapoint.com (Brian Ruptash) Newsgroups: tor.news Subject: Toronto Distribution Message-ID: <176@dptcdc.datapoint.com> Date: 9 Dec 88 18:30:04 GMT Article-I.D.: dptcdc.176 Sender: bar@dptcdc.datapoint.com Lines: 46 As a newcomer to the Toronto news community, I've been keeping a closer-than-usual eye on what's coming through my system and why. I've noticed the following peculiarity, and wonder if anyone else has any comments on it. As I understand, the "tor.news.stats" newsgroup is forwarded between all local adjacent systems that support news, as a mechanism to keep an eye on regional UUCP congestion. That implies that the group is forwarded not only downstream and back upstream, but sideways as well, as a means of identifying problems with primary news feeds. can, ont and tor appear to be used as both the regional newsgroup hierarchies and distributions. That means if I put a "world,tor.news.stats" in my sys file for other than my upstream and downstream news feeds, only those postings with a distribution of world will be forwarded. Apparently, however, sites are posting with a combination of world, tor and local (I wonder how the postings make it out of these last systems, unless they forward "all"). If I say "world,tor,tor.news.stats", the site gets not only tor.news.stats, but all tor groups. That would necessitate saying "world,tor,tor.news.stats,!tor.general,!tor.whatever,..." (Dave Sherman suggests "world,tor,!tor.all,tor.news.stats", which is a tad more efficient). I guess the observation is twofold; firstly, postings to tor.news.stats should probably be distribution world, to simplify the sys file entries for adjacent systems which are simply exchanging these statistics, and to avoid unnecessary propagation of the other regional newsgroups. Secondly, it seems that since a sys file doesn't distinguish distributions from newsgroups, the names of regional newsgroups should be distinct from the regional distributions themselves, to better facilitate distinguishing between the newsgroups propagated and the geographical distribution. Note that the latter is just an observation, as it would undoubtedly be impractical to change the regional distributions at this point. Of course, the problem could be better solved by news distinguishing between distributions and newsgroups in its sys file format. Does any of that make sense? Or am I out to lunch? -- Brian Ruptash | Internet: bar@datapoint.com Principal Architect | UUCP: {uunet, utzoo}!dptcdc!bar Datapoint Corporation | Phone: (416) 222-8005