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From: jonab@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Jonathan Biggar)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: cleaning up the net -- software solutions proposed
Message-ID: <2162@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Jul-85 12:12:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.2162
Posted: Wed Jul 17 12:12:15 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Jul-85 10:49:07 EDT
References: <2982@nsc.UUCP>
Reply-To: jonab@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Jonathan Biggar)
Distribution: net
Organization: System Development Corp. R+D, Santa Monica
Lines: 39
Summary: 

Chuqui suggests the following solutions to net abuse:

1) Site protection for the System Admin:

This one is the least intrusive to the net as a whole.  If a SA cuts off
a user or site, he only has to deal with reactions from users on his own
machine, IF the cut off articles are still forwarded.

2) Article length restrictions:

Who makes the arbirtrary decisions on size?  What if a site changes its
software to allow larger postings on restricted newsgroups?  Do you drop
such articles on the floor when you receive them?  If you do add this,
the simplest way would be to add another field to the active file.

3) Etiquette enforcements:

Again, who makes the decisions?  How do you add new restrictions?

4) Followup fan-in:

This solution will not work well at all.  Suppose I subscribe to net.aaa
but not net.bbb.  If someone posts an article to net.aaa and net.bbb, I will
see all of the discussion in net.aaa and everything is fine.  However, if
they post it to net.bbb and net.aaa, I will see the original article and
NONE of the followups, even if I am very interested.  This requires me to
watch the Newsgroups line carefully and subscribe to net.bbb for the duration
of the discussion; but since this will continually happen, I should just
subscribe to net.bbb permanently and spend an extra 2 hours a day reading
news because I now subscribe to nearly all newsgroups.

A new suggestion:  Have all of the Subject and Newsgroups lines of locally
posted articles mailed to the SA every day.  This would allow responsible
SAs to keep reign on local users without having to read all of the news 
to find any offenders.  This could be easily done with a sed or awk script
that looks through the /usr/lib/news/log file.

Jon Biggar
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdccsu3}!sdcrdcf!jonab