Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: warning to all sinners in regard to current C News patches Message-ID: <1991Apr3.172825.27190@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1991 17:28:25 GMT References: <1991Mar24.035259.20738@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991Mar31.055947.18653@looking.on.ca> <1991Apr03.033233.16633@buster.stafford.tx.us> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology In article <1991Apr03.033233.16633@buster.stafford.tx.us> rli@buster.stafford.tx.us writes: >... everyone would have to continue accepting the out of spec >articles for a period of time while we track down and notify the >source of the bad articles. Unfortunately, it's hard to make this work. The combination of header rewriting at B News sites and apathy/inertia/workload of sysadmins would make it relatively difficult to get results this way. The intent of the "bad articles" reports in newsdaily's output was to achieve the same thing, on a more local level and with teeth: sysadmins can report to their neighbors that articles are being dropped for bad headers. >... Simply dropping the offensive articles on the >floor is not an acceptable answer. It's hard to do anything else. Bouncing them back to the author is not a viable approach. Not only does it easily result in the originator getting hundreds of mail messages, but *the originator is usually an innocent victim of bad software*. We judged that having a gateway machine tell its neighbor "everything you send us is being dropped" was much more effective, and had a better chance of getting the message to people who could do something about it. -- "The stories one hears about putting up | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology SunOS 4.1.1 are all true." -D. Harrison| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry