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From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: cleaning up the net -- software solutions proposed
Message-ID: <331@phri.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Jul-85 14:14:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: phri.331
Posted: Fri Jul 19 14:14:24 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Jul-85 00:06:32 EDT
References: <2961@nsc.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 32

Chuqui says:
> 3) Etiquette enforcements: [...]  I suggest that the inews software be
> modified to mung headers to enforce specific cross-posting restrictions.

	I see a problem.  You start with a list of newsgroups and rules for
what should be done when articles are cross-posted to those groups.  This
is fine, but you don't want to build the rules too deeply into the system.
Newsgroups come and go; the rules will become obsolete, and people will
have to go digging into their software to change them.  The idea, however,
is fundamentally sound.

	How about having a file which is a list of productions.  At some
point in the processing of an article you run the production processor on
the article.  No reason why the production list need be restricted to
checking for cross postings.  There could be ways to check for and deal
with long signatures, over-quoting, etc.  It would be simple (I think) to
also incorporate the stop-list idea into this.

	My God, this is starting to sound like sendmail!

	Anyway, it would be relatively easy to ship updated production sets
around the net, perhaps using a control message.  If you had some simple
pre-processing capability (imbedded m4 commands?) you could have a global
part (under what passes for central control on usenet), and a local part
which SA's could write themselves to add whatever rules they want.  Sort of
like /etc/rc and /etc/rc.local, I guess.  I suppose you could even have
newgroup messages include a set of productions to be added at each site
with rules for that group (assuming this additional stuff in the newgroup
message won't break existing software).
-- 
allegra!phri!roy (Roy Smith)
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute