Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!malgudi!osc.edu!karl.kleinpaste
From: karl.kleinpaste@osc.edu
Subject: Re: BITFTP grief!
Message-ID: <1991May15.133029.3823@oar.net>
Sender: news@oar.net
Nntp-Posting-Host: ashley.osc.edu
Organization: Viento Gigabit Testbed, Ohio Supercomputer Center
References: <1991May15.042146.29800@iguana.uucp>
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 15 May 1991 14:29:41 GMT
Lines: 51

merce@iguana.uucp writes:
   [ please note that i am under the buzz of a couple beers

I dunno, I kinda think that such a buzz might be just the thing after
fighting BITFTP-assaulted systems for a day or three.

I wrote a similar flame regarding MBASes last December; I got a lot of
support, but I also got a lot of abuse for, e.g., "not helping the
users put the system to use properly."  I would like to know from
where such a definition of "properly" derives.

   first it was a 60 Meg VMS utility
   next it was a 12 Meg VMS uucp suite
   last night it was...gcc source and gas source

The local offenders from my neck of the woods tend to want
	GNU Emacs
	_All_ the RFCs
	Every service document the NIC has.
	A horde of Amiga and Mac things
	"ls -lR" listings of every ftp site known to humankind.
and of course a wide selection of less common things.

   Education!

Educating email users in the etiquette of "intermediate link non-abuse"
is like educating new Usenet users:  You can't explain it to them until
they've screwed up, usually pretty badly.  Until then, they think
they're somehow immune from any social side effects of what they do.

   please tell your users to post to the local *.general groups to see if
   it is local.

What if the community in question hasn't access to a Usenet system?
(Mine doesn't.  It's CompuServe.  No news.  Not like this, anyway.)

   how much of a net.lobby do we have to do to get pucc.princeton.edu to shut
   down BITFTP?

I don't want it shut down; I want it made load-sensitive.  A variety
of schemes can be used for that, which were discussed last December.

   - efficient rmail frontend which will "act" on key phrases in the To: and
     From_ headers

Either hack the rmail from the Berkeley sendmail distribution, or use
something like smail 2.5 and hack its operation when invoked as rmail
to do what you want.  Most of what you need to do can be done without
peeking at the header at all; just operate on the envelope.

--karl