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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!drutx!mtuxo!houxm!whuxl!whuxlm!akgua!gatech!seismo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas
From: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.news.adm
Subject: Re: Moderation in Some Things
Message-ID: <1684@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Feb-86 13:52:51 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1684
Posted: Mon Feb 17 13:52:51 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Feb-86 01:04:32 EST
References: <7031@ki4pv.UUCP>
Reply-To: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Organization: University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Lines: 22
Xref: watmath net.news.group:5087 net.news.adm:517

In net.news.group article <7031@ki4pv.UUCP> tanner@ki4pv.UUCP (Tanner Andrews) writes:
>Considering the amount of traffic in this newsgroup, so much of which
>consists in >'ed copy of earlier text with the added text "good idea"
>or "lousy idea"

We recently (finally) upgraded our news software to (I believe) 2.10.3
(came with the 4.3 beta release), and it has an interesting (optional)
feature in inews.  If an article is posted (locally) with more
"included" text than "original" text, inews rejects it.  If every site
on the net enabled this feature, it would probably help the over-quoting
problem a lot.  Of course, to really clamp down (and get lots of
"Hitlerite" hate mail), the backbone sites could implement the feature
for ALL news passing through (presumably mailing the article back to the
originator).

Of course, the system is subject to abuse.  One can easily bypass the
check by changing the string used to mark inclusions to (say) "->" or 
"' ".  But I bet it would help.

Resignedly yours,
-- 
=Spencer   ({ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!thomas, thomas@utah-cs.ARPA)