Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!caip.rutgers.edu!toccata.rutgers.edu!rlr From: rlr@toccata.rutgers.edu (Rich Rosen) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Who's Messing With The Usenet ? Keywords: article, duplication, monkey business Message-ID: Date: 17 Sep 89 16:48:27 GMT References: <2056@avsd.UUCP> <14682@bfmny0.UU.NET> <1989Sep16.152857.14239@ddsw1.MCS.COM> Organization: RLRCLC Lines: 61 > We're getting lots of dups too. But they have DIFFERENT Message IDs here... > From: rlr@toccata.rutgers.edu (Rich Rosen) > Newsgroups: news.admin > Subject: Re: Site Admin stuff -- what if I give boneheads accounts? > Message-ID: > References: <7260@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> > And... > From: rlr@toccata.rutgers.edu (Rich Rosen) > Newsgroups: news.admin > Subject: Re: Site Admin stuff -- what if I give boneheads accounts? > Message-ID: > References: <2380@flatline.UUCP> <1489@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US> <1989Sep6.001332.12167@NCoast.ORG> > Organization: RLRCLC > It looks to me like someone is using some other mechanism than the Usenet > stuff to post, and in addition their "crosslink" software is posting > articles TWICE! OHMYGOD!!! The reason I had to post it twice in the first place was *because* "the Usenet stuff" decided to "fix" (its words) my reference line "for" me. (I'd always used 'f' commands to post almost everything, since followup commands, in my day (oh no, there he goes, talking about the good old days), didn't care what you put into the article; you could "followup" an article in nose.sinus.headache and replace the text with a completely different article intended for elbow.funnybone.gonad and it would go to the intended place; apparently some 'f' functions are sneakier and clevererer nowadays...) Anyway, since postnews is an abomination to me, and since rn isn't installed here, I had to figure out a vnews equivalent. 'f'-ing was the best I could come up with on a moment's notice. I wasn't able to cancel either article until much later because I had no idea how to cancel something I didn't yet know the article-ID of (it didn't appear here until much later). I apologize if this caused conniption fits among news administrators. > The problem, of course, is that it is darn difficult if > not impossible to track these down automatically, since they are, by > definition, different articles. I'd have to estimate that I see about 2-5 > of these a day -- and I only read a small subpart of the entire net > (who could possibly read the entire thing?!). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ You're talking to him, but of course that was many eons ago. I remember when... [WAR STORIES TOLD WITH CREAKING OLD-MAN JEWISH ACCENT DELETED FOR SANITY] I'll bet where you see two (roughly) equivalent articles with different IDs, you are witnessing an article that was posted twice for whatever reason. Since in many locally-networked or remote news servers you can't tell if your article's been "posted" for an undetermined amount of time, I can't think of a means of cancelling something that was just missent, so I'm sure that accounts for a number of these dupes. (Also the naive user who doesn't see his/her article immediately and panics...) > Is this a case of broken software, or broken users posting things twice? In this case, a broken user, but worry not. I've been fixed, and I won't be impregnating the net with a litter of random/duplicated/otherwise inane articles. (That should help some people sleep better tonight... :-) -- "Time to eat all your words, swallow your pride, open your eyes..." Rich Rosen rlr@toccata.rutgers.edu