Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: GNU Mailing Lists Message-ID: Date: 28 Aug 89 18:21:06 GMT References: <8908281520.AA00694@sprite.crd.Ge.Com> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Bob Sutterfield Distribution: gnu Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 63 In-reply-to: montnaro@sprite.crd.ge.com's message of 28 Aug 89 15:20:07 GMT In article <8908281520.AA00694@sprite.crd.Ge.Com> montnaro@sprite.crd.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) writes: I sent this message to gnu-misc-discuss a couple of weeks ago, but never saw it turn up in gnu.misc.discuss, and never heard from anybody, Yes, it appeared in the group, and I've had it sitting there marked as unread all this time. Thanks for jarring my elbow... I've seen many complaints about people posting to the gnu.* newsgroups instead of mailing to the gnu mailing lists. That's because some people's news systems give incorrect or incomplete addresses in From: and Reply-To:, so when the articles get gatewayed to the mailing lists it's very hard to figure out the actual origin of the note. 1. Why not moderate the gnu.* newsgroups (at least officially)? I thought one of the features of the News software (correct me if I'm wrong) was that messages posted to moderated newsgroups were automatically mailed to the moderator. Couldn't the moderator's address just be the mailing list address? Technically, perhaps an ideal solution. Socially, not at all. Moderated newsgroups depend upon a couple dozen Usenet "backbone" sites maintaining a list of aliases (see Spaf's periodic "how to construct a mailpaths file" article). There's already one moderated GNU group in that list, gnu.announce, and it was the first non-Usenet group to gain such a distinction. It would likely be socially disadvantageous (is that a nice way to put it? :-) to impose more than that upon the hospitality of the Usenet. gnu.* is already accused of enough. 2. If 1. isn't possible, could the posting program be coerced to add a header field (maybe Followup-To, or X-List-Address, or ...) to each message that indicates the proper address to which postings should be mailed? That would require the modification of lots of posting programs at lots of sites, and would be unwieldy if not impossible. 3. There are 17 GNU mailing list/newsgroups. Actually, there are 20 groups now. Why not create a set of mailing list reflectors, all on a single machine, with names derived directly from the newsgroups (e.g. gnu.utils.bug -> gnu-utils-bug@std.address)? The reflectors could simply forward all incoming mail to the real mailing lists. Most of the mailing lists maintained elsewhere at least have reflector counterparts on prep.ai.mit.edu, but they're named for the mailing lists. All the newsgroups have hyphens-substituted-for-dots aliases on tut.cis.ohio-state.edu, but those go into the newsgroups and from there out to the mailing lists. It wouldn't be too much trouble for someone (else) to set up aliases, named for the newsgroups, that would feed into the mailing lists. The problem would be that there's no technical means to automatically coerce users to use mail and not news. The best general solution, with the greatest "effect leverage", would be to persuade administrators of systems that generate non-useful headers (bad From:, no Reply-To:) to fix their news systms.