Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale From: tale@rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Why do I get junk newsgroups? Message-ID: Date: 24 Feb 91 23:49:17 GMT References: <20752@teda.UUCP> <1991Feb21.051023.8661@johnny5.uucp> Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Computer Science, Troy NY Lines: 70 Nntp-Posting-Host: 128.213.1.1 In <1991Feb21.051023.8661@johnny5.uucp> garvey@johnny5.uucp (Joe Garvey): I've recently examined the local flow of articles into junk... we're not talking about an overwhelming number. My personal feeling is that an article ending up in junk means something is wrong, either at my site or elsewhere. While I would not call the numbers "overwhelming", any is too many. In the case of most alternative hierarchies (except alt.*) and USENET, I take the time to send a message to the person posting the article and to his news admin if I think the problem was at their end, to help the person better use the network for the communication that was being attempted. It generally goes like this: The group you posted to does not exist in the net at large; it should either be removed at your site or the posting software should be fixed to not allow posting to non-existent groups. Try posting to [[whatever group looked appropriate for the topic of the article]]. In the cases of "dumb" (my point of view) news groups like alt.stupid.putz, I don't know what the net can do. Obviously in alt, nothing... it's the way alt works. The "way alt works" is the most enigmatic of all hierarchies which get very widespread distribution. In the case of "psuedo real" groups like comp...novell, I think you have to let them propigate... as long as there's interest. I disagree. The propagation of groups like this is not a service; as long as people in only very few sites think that it exists, their attempts to communicate down that channel could very easily be frustrating. In the case of this particular group, to people who actually had it created at their site then it looked to them to be as valid as comp.dcom.lans.cisco, though probably getting about 1/100th the propagation (in terms of sites carrying a group by that name, not in terms of sites carrying the articles). The net at large had no idea, also, whether the gateway was bidirectional such that any new articles propagating back into Berkeley for that group would have indeed been gatewayed back to the target audience which was creating all of the traffic to begin with. This all happened after there was already a novell group created in USENET, too. My neighbors (on the net) have been less than meticulous (sp?) keeping their active files current. I created my active file from theirs. Now, I find some junk groups... that clearly aren't junk. Posting queries on what are valid groups draws marginally useful responses. My solution has been to examine the articles... if they look good, then I do a local new group. This only aggrevates the problem, because anyone who gets a feed from me will use my active file as a starting point... further propigating possibly bogus (groups not having gone through the normal creation proceedure) news groups. But what else can I do? I read junk, for the very reason of tracking down these problems. You can check out the news.lists group lists and then follow the groups which are responsible for starting out new groups in hierarchies you get. The traffic is normally light on them, news.groups being an exception (but you can certainly make do just by following news.announce.newgroups) and alt.config following behind but still not nearly as high on traffic. Watch for newgroup message in control, and ignore those that look forged --- just kill all of the "cancel" traffic in control and reading the rest makes it a simple group to follow. [BTW, I heard Gene Spafford has stopped posting his list of newsgroups, is this true?] No. They are probably also the best source of information of what is valid and what is not; you can build your own checkgroups out of them to not have such a haphazard active file. -- (setq mail '("tale@rpi.edu" "uupsi!rpi!tale" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))