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From: timk@wynnds.xenitec.on.ca (Tim Kuehn)
Subject: A way out? re: cnews dumping articles
Organization: TDK Consulting Services
Date: Sun, 19 May 1991 03:52:00 GMT
Message-ID: <1991May19.035200.879@wynnds.xenitec.on.ca>
References: <1991May16.151523.28123@zoo.toronto.edu> <swT423w164w@mantis.co.uk> <1991May18.211109.20401@zoo.toronto.edu>

In <1991May18.211109.20401@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu 
	(Henry Spencer) writes:
>In <swT423w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) writes:
>>> It is not broken and consequently will not be fixed.
>>It loses articles unnecessarily, without reporting its delivery failure to
>>the originator.
>>I call that broken.

>You may call it what you wish.  Our experience is that all alternatives are
>worse.  The losses, while regrettable, are necessary.  They are reported
>to the local sysadmin, which is the best that can be done safely.  If you
>want this to be changed, propose a workable, fully thought out alternative
>without serious side effects.  (Hint:  you're going to have to put some
>serious effort into this, because all the obvious schemes occurred to us
>long ago.  You needn't bother repeating them, and I'm not going to bother
>telling you yet again what's wrong with them.)

What are these obvious schemes - besides sending an email to the offending 
site for each badly formatted article? 

How about if a cron script tabulated the type of offenses Cnews found 
over a given period of time (say, a week) and posted a tabulation to 
control, news.lists, or some other group reporting the which sites are
posting broken articles, what they're doing wrong, and how often they're
doing it wrong?

The report could consist of a header line detailing the code of the 
offenses reported, and then a list of detail lines with the name of the 
offending systems and what they're doing wrong.

The general format would be: 
<hdr line detailing the offense codes reported>
<detail lines with the offending system name and offense list>
<detail lines with the offending system name and offense list>
<detail lines with the offending system name and offense list>


And would look like this: 

xx=offense1, yy=offense2, zz=offense3, etc. 	
<site_name>: xx(999), yy(999), zz(999)


This could potentially generate a fair bit of traffic on the target 
newsgroup (until people got their broken SW fixed), but it'd surely 
be less traffic than is found in some groups that are already in 
existance (like alt.desert-*) and a lot more useful in pointing out 
who's got the broken software on the net without seriously breaking 
or overloading the offending site's mail spool, or their upstream spool.

I haven't seen this scenario in the list of 'obvious alternatives.'
Comments?

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
Tim Kuehn			 TDK Consulting Services  (519)-888-0766
timk@wynnds.xenitec.on.ca  -or-  !{watmath|lsuc}!xenitec!wynnds!timk
Valpo EE turned loose on unsuspecting world! News at 11!
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