Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!njsmu!mccc!monymsys!david
From: david@monymsys.uucp (David Kozinn)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Methods for updating a feeds sys file
Message-ID: <1989Nov13.145624.15454@monymsys.uucp>
Date: 13 Nov 89 14:56:24 GMT
Reply-To: david@monymsys.UUCP (David Kozinn)
Organization: MONY Financial Services, Microcomputer Systems, Teaneck, NJ
Lines: 30

I've recently started receiving a feed of a small subset of all the available
news topics. My upstream feed has been very helpful in getting me set up and
helping me weed out the groups that I have no interest in. Most of this has
taken place by me sending him an updated sys file every few days as I go
through the process of eliminating groups from major categories. I realize
that many (most?) sites probably just take these large categories and leave it
up to their users as to what they want to keep and what they want to reject,
but as this is (currently) a small machine with limited capacity, and given
that I'm calling long distance for my news, I'm trying to minimize the amount
of data transferred.

So much for the intro, now to the meat: It would seem that I'm not the only
person in the world who has ever had to do this, and for feeds that don't have
an administrator as patient as mine (thanks Pete!) it would seem to make sense
to figure out some automated way to do this. I've read the manuals, looked at
RFC 1036 to see if there is a control message, and asked a few folks, and from
what I've been able to determine, there doesn't seem to be an automated way to
tell your upstream feed that you'd like to have the list of groups modified 
that are sent to you. 

The question is: Is there some way to do this automatically? If not, would
this be a useful feature to have? I'm not sure exactly how it would be
implemented (perhaps a regular mail message to news@yourfeed with some special
contents), but do others think that this would be a useful thing to have?
-- 
David Kozinn            | UUCP:      {rutgers | uunet}!cbmvax!cgh!monymys!david
MONY Financial Services	| UUCP:      ...!rutgers!princeton!mccc!monymsys!david
Glenpointe Center West  | Internet:  cgh!monymsys!david@manta.pha.pa.us
Mail Drop 75-14         | GEnie:     D.KOZINN
Teaneck, NJ 07666-6888  | Telephone: +1-201-907-6990