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From: mrm@sceard.Sceard.COM (M.R.Murphy)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.142047.15384@sceard.Sceard.COM>
Date: 25 Jun 91 14:20:47 GMT
References: <1991Jun21.152743.22927@sceard.Sceard.COM> <81Z2445w164w@mantis.co.uk>
Reply-To: mrm@Sceard.COM (M.R.Murphy)
Organization: The Mole and Badger Association of Northern San Diego County
Lines: 57

In article <81Z2445w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) writes:
>mrm@sceard.Sceard.COM (M.R.Murphy) writes:
>> In article <DNJs414w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *
>> [...]
>> >The worst possible case is that we get one short error report for each bad
>> >article.
>> 
>> Your "we" is a bit centric, isn't it? The worst case is that every site that
>> gets the error reporting newsgroup gets the report.
>
>Yes. "We" being "the population of Usenet".
In the case that your "We" is not just your site, then you are almost correct.
The whole population of Usenet may receive the error report that is interesting
only to your site. That is what I mean by a global solution to a local problem.
It is Not A Good Thing.
>
>>                                                     If the error is reported
>> through the generation of a new message,
>
>It isn't.  It's reported through replacing a bad message with a good one.
The good one is a new message. It isn't the same set of headers as the old
message. The site that fed you the bad message will get the new message, too.
BTW, you'll also have to change the Path: header, or none of the sites in the
path will get the message. If you change the Path: header to contain just
your (the posting site), I would suggest to you that qualifies as a new message.

>
>>         It is a waste of a global resource to solve a local problem.
>
>News sites barfing badly-formatted news articles onto the net is not a "local
>problem".  It affects everyone.

That's why C news drops the articles :-). It might be better if C news were to

  1) Save the header or the whole offending dropped article, take your pick
     based on space available for the job. A reasonable way might be to append
     the headers to a file like /usr/lib/news/dropped.
  2) In the course of normal daily cleanup,
       stripheaders <dropped | mail "$NEWSMASTER"
       cp dropped dropped.o
       cp /dev/null dropped
  3) Have the script that does the deed for 1) be named
       ${NEWSBIN}/inject/mathew
     so that it can live near
       ${NEWSBIN}/inject/anne.jones
  4) Apply :-) to 3) above.
  5) The news administrator, being deluged with mail rather than having to
     remember to scan the logs, is more likely to let a site know that
     articles are being dropped.
  6) If the site being dropped is not responsive, it wouldn't be much trouble
     to have stripheaders ignore that site or members of a list of sites. Or
     posters :-)

The script stripheaders can be twisted from ${NEWSBIN}/inject/tear with very
little effort.
-- 
Mike Murphy  mrm@Sceard.COM  ucsd!sceard!mrm  +1 619 598 5874