Xref: utzoo news.admin:15048 news.software.b:8180 Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!viusys!alembic!csu From: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: <1991Jun7.235143.12451@alembic.acs.com> Organization: Alembic Computer Services, McLean VA References: <1991Jun4.193039.18424@alembic.acs.com> Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1991 23:51:43 GMT In article mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) writes: >csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes: >> Here's a clue for you, mathew: we are not obligated to ensure that >> *any* article gets propagated. > >Well, no. But if you feed any other site, that site is probably under the >impression that it is getting a feed of all the articles in the newsgroups it >requests. I do hope you will explain that you are, in fact, deliberately and >unnecessarily silently discarding articles whether they like it or not. If the sites I feed are under this impression, they are sadly mistaken. I have a 60 MB news partition on this machine. If it fills up and news gets dropped on the floor, that's life. If I run out of inodes, I expire everything older than one day, and if some of it hasn't been batched yet for transmission to my downstream sites, well, that's life. And if some bit of defective software (or defective wetware) produces a malformed header and C News chucks it into the bit bucket, that also is life. If uunet gets struck by lightning (again) and all the news that arrived in the last twelve hours vanishes, that's like life, only worse. Nor do I feel compelled to report such events. I don't have the time. "Usenet is not real life" (St. Spafford.) The occasional article lost is of no particular importance in the overall scheme of things. >Furthermore, if your attitude to people at other sites making errors is "fuck >you", then presumably you don't send bounce messages for badly-addressed >mail. Of course not. My good buddy, Mailer Daemon, does it for me. If he can. If he can't, the odds are I can't either, because the problem is either a return address that is garbage or at some other site that I have no control over. Maybe I should try to get in touch by long-distance phone call to let people know that their e-mail bounced? >> And if any article doesn't conform >> to the relevant RFCs, there are damned good reasons for *not* >> propagating it, as has already been explained to you in excruciating >> detail. > >Indeed. If you want to throw away any article which is even slightly wrong, >then that's entirely up to you. Just make sure you tell the people who think >that you are forwarding articles. Sorry, no. I have to pay real live money for my communication costs. If you can't generate articles that are acceptable to the news transport software, that is entirely and exclusively your problem. Mathew, I'm sure you spent a lot of time and effort on the articles you posted which were trashed by the C News site upstream of you. I'm sorry about that. But what Henry and Geoff have done with C News was the right thing to do in the long run. Maybe, eventually, we'll come up with a decent scheme to notify sites with defective software without penalizing all the intermediate sites. I hope so. -- Dave Mack net.fascist