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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: cleaning up the net -- software revisited
Message-ID: <3023@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Jul-85 13:45:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.3023
Posted: Tue Jul 23 13:45:32 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jul-85 07:32:40 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: The Dreamer Fithp
Lines: 62

Based on the feedback I've been getting, I wanted to post and updated
version of my software suggestions. Please feel free to comment further --
this is more or less what I'm looking at as an implementation guide, so if
we don't change it now, it'll turn into code (at which point it will be too
late, of course...)

The line length limitation suggestion, while an interesting intellectual
idea, has some bizarre practical implications. I'm also not terribly sure
it would solve anything at this point, so I'm dropping it. There may be
better ways of looking at this later.

Followup-fan-in: A better (and probably easier to implement) form of
    followup-fan-in has been suggested. Rather than mung out the header of
    followups, mung out the header of all articles with a non-null
    'followup-to' so that it will followup to the first newsgroup on the
    newsgroup list. 

    This has the great advantage that it only modifies articles that have
    no explicit 'followup-to' header line, allowing people out there to
    manually override when they feel it neccessary while still
    accomplishing the proper default. By adding the followup-to line, rn
    will now show a header line to readers showing where the future
    discussion will be, making it easier to track down an interesting
    conversation (without having to make major software changes, either).

Etiquette enforcement: Jerry@oliveb has been nice enough to implement
    the enforcement for net.flame. I suggest we extend it to the following
    groups as well:

	net.flame
	net.misc
	net.net-people
	net.followup
	net.general

    Also, if the groups 'net.unix-wizards,net.unix' are cross posted,
    remove 'net.unix-wizards'
    
    There are a lot of other enforcements I'd like to make, but I want to
    study the implications further before I make specific suggestions --
    they aren't always clear cut. Thanks to Jerry's work, this is also
    rather trivial to implement. If we decide later to do a more extensive
    enforcement, it should be broken out into a separate function and file
    for ease of maintenance (see my article on munc_header()).

rogue users and the hit list: This proposal is essentially unchanged, and
    seems to be pretty well supported. Unfortunately, since it is a fair
    amount of code I don't know when I'll get it implemented (the other two
    are serious weekend hacks) and I'm considering a brute force method
    temporarily. 

I'm still interested in comments -- I'm specifically interested in the
feelings on the net on enforcement of those other groups -- I think a
strong case can be made for all of them that cross-postings should be
avoided (the weakest being net.net-people). For net.general, net.followup,
and net.misc, I think the proper approach would be to remove them from the
list instead of the others, but I'm still open to suggestion.
-- 
:From the carousel of the autumn carnival:        Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui   nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

Your fifteen minutes are up. Please step aside!