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From: spaf@gatech.CSNET (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: net.ham-radio,net.news.group
Subject: Re: new group net.ham-radio.packet -- history/apology/future
Message-ID: <338@gatech.CSNET>
Date: Thu, 20-Jun-85 09:24:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: gatech.338
Posted: Thu Jun 20 09:24:10 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Jun-85 00:53:40 EDT
References: <459@mtunh.UUCP> <315@gatech.CSNET> <11294@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Reply-To: spaf@gatech.UUCP (Gene Spafford)
Organization: The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech
Lines: 48
Xref: watmath net.ham-radio:2861 net.news.group:3171
Summary: 

In article <11294@brl-tgr.ARPA> ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) writes:
>Gene, get off it.  Perhaps you would volunteer to moderate this list?
>Perhaps you'd like to moderate all the net groups so that problems
>won't occur?  

No, I certainly don't want to moderate any groups.  I do however
continue to advocate using "mod" groups for Arpa-gatewayed groups.
Let me explain the mechanism to make it a bit clearer.

Jill Usenetter wants to submit an article to the news for publication
in some newsgroup gatewayed to/from the Arpanet.  She "posts" it
to the "mod" group using the standard news software (soon to be 2.10.3).
The article doesn't start propagating through the net from her node.
Instead, it gets mailed to the "moderator" of the group -- in this case,
the "moderator" is actually the news distribution software at the
gateway.  The news software then "approves" the article (possibly with
the intervention of the moderator, in the case of a digestified
news list on the Arpanet), and gets sent out both to the Arpa side *and*
the Usenet side from the same site.a  It is entirely possible
that no person acts as "moderator" in this setup -- we simply use
the built-in "mod" mechanism to support the list.  It also provides
the means for an Arpa digest maintainer to get things from the Usenet
side in a consistent manner.

Other advantages:
	-- Since there is no possibility of followups beating
	their base article to the gateway, Arpanetters never have
	to contend with the common Usenet problem of reading
	responses to articles they haven't read yet.  (This
	is also solved for Usenetters, BTW.)

	-- with the addition of a human in the mechanism, the
	newsgroup could be immediately available for Stargate,
	whenever that goes "live".

	-- there is almost no possibility of a "feedback-loop"
	whereby the same article gets posted to one network
	hundreds of times (this happens about every 6 months
	with one of the Arpa-gatewayed groups).

There, Ron, Have I "gotten off it"?  Or did you have something
else in mind?

-- 
Gene "3 months and holding" Spafford
The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
CSNet:	Spaf @ GATech		ARPA:	Spaf%GATech.CSNet @ CSNet-Relay.ARPA
uucp:	...!{akgua,allegra,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!spaf