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From: epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: New Newsgroup Queries
Message-ID: <598@wet.UUCP>
Date: 26 Sep 89 10:28:52 GMT
References: <586@wet.UUCP> <4173@cbnewsh.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott)
Distribution: na
Organization: Wetware Diversions, San Francisco
Lines: 30

In article <4173@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM
	(Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs) writes:
>IMHO, I was a rather competent news administrator (my machine has
>since retired), but bogus newsgroups would get created there anyway.  Why?
>Because I ran one of the few systems in the known universe that
>didn't use the MANUALLY option - my machine would accept any
>newgroup and rmgroup requests that came across the network, because
>I considered it to be better policy to accept incoming control
>messages than to have to do it all by hand.  ...
> ...                 But part of it was a hold-over to the early
>days when netnews was a cooperative venture, where anybody could
>create a newsgroup when they wanted to, and things worked ok.

Those days are gone.  Do you believe in majority rule?  Well over
50% of the newgroups that hit my site are BOGUS.  People try to
unmoderate moderated groups, C News goes apesh*t, alt groups come
and go within the span of a few hours, even a few "let's see what
happens if I deliberately try to create a bogus newsgroup(!)"
come through.  It's much easier to drop the losers and grant the
few legitimate ones... especially when inews mails me a shell
script to do it.  It's really not a lot of effort.  The only
"problem" is when a newgroup goes out and is immediately followed
by "Hi, this is the first message to this group and it's really
important that you read what's here."  Those go straight into
junk.  And it's no doubt happening on a lot of sites.  C'mon
guys, I know how excited you are to finally have soc.culture.jedr
after weeks of discussion and voting.  Another day or two to
allow the group to actually get created won't kill you.

					-=EPS=-