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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!ukma!david
From: david@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: subscribers script (warning..?)
Message-ID: <2217@ukma.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Sep-85 23:02:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: ukma.2217
Posted: Wed Sep 18 23:02:59 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Sep-85 05:02:00 EDT
References: <2161@ukma.UUCP> <2166@ukma.UUCP> <619@decuac.UUCP> <405@persci.UUCP>
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences, Lexington KY
Lines: 39

In article <405@persci.UUCP>, bill@persci.UUCP writes:
> All this discussion about .newsrc reading script presupposes that every user
> maintains his .newsrc file. That is not true at this site. Some people are
> subscribed to *everything* and never read news, others drop in on newsgroups
> as they will, never subscribing/unsubscribing. 

This is a *known*problem*, and I did put in a heuristic to get rid
of some of this ....   very simply.  If the last read article number
is LESS THAN the LEAST article number in the group then this
datum is tossed out.  

The only better method for getting around this is to keep some running
statistics between runs of the program.  You'd be looking for things
like the amount of traffic in the group versus any reading done in
the group.  F'r instance, if somebody didn't read a group for a week
then he's not really reading it.

But that seemed like to much to bite off for a project that was supposed
to fill a weekend...



While I have your attention ... I found another problem today .. The sed
script depends on a particular variable being exported to the environment.
But my script (as distributed) doesn't do this.  (It exports an entirely
different variable....)  To solve this I simply exported everything!
Also, I added a PATH definition so I could run the program from cron
as root (thereby see a lot of .newsrc files I miss if running as news).



Anybody feel like volunteering for making it keep running statistics?
-- 
--- David Herron
--- ARPA-> ukma!david@ANL-MCS.ARPA
--- UUCP-> {ucbvax,unmvax,boulder,oddjob}!anlams!ukma!david
---        {ihnp4,decvax,ucbvax}!cbosgd!ukma!david

Hackin's in me blood.  My mother was known as Miss Hacker before she married!


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