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From: stephen@dcl-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: The 50% rule is in--now what?
Message-ID: <32@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 21-Nov-86 12:44:39 EST
Article-I.D.: dcl-csva.32
Posted: Fri Nov 21 12:44:39 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Nov-86 03:38:57 EST
References: <751@chinet.UUCP> <212@cartan.Berkeley.EDU> <1333@PUCC.BITNET> <641@comp.lancs.ac.uk> <80@reality1.UUCP>
Reply-To: stephen@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Stephen J. Muir)
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 34
Summary: machines shouldn't interpret human text

In article <80@reality1.UUCP> james@reality1.UUCP (james) writes:
>Perhaps then it is time to have rnews check for include limitations when an
>article is received from another site.  That was even if comp.lancs.ac.uk
>posts messages 95% included text, the backbones won't spend their money
>transporting it around the world.  I can hear screams of censorship already,
>but unless Mr. Muir is willing to pay the phone bills to carry messages with
>large quantities of included text, I doubt the backbones will have much choice.

Now look here.  There is *no way* that you can stop users from doing this.
They can change the included text character from ">" to anything they want.
Diff listings also use ">".  Sometimes, it is appropriate to have 50% more
included text than new text.  We only allow members of staff at this research
institution to send news articles, and if they decide to have more included
text than new text then it will be for a good reason.  If not, I shall
reprimand them and, if this doesn't work, prohibit them from posting in future.

I am in agreement with the reasoning behind the 50% rule, but I do not agree
with the way it is enforced.  As far as I'm concerned, any net abuse should
result in the poster being prohibited in future.  It is my principle that the
news system should not interpret the contents of news articles that I am
thinking about.

I shall also take the same action against any poster who posts the same
article *separately* to several newsgroups, uses inappropriate newsgroups,
posts non source material to net.sources etc.

To summarise, the duty of preventing abuse is that of the news administrator
and not by checking the contents of a news article.  Computers are still not as
good a judge as a human.
-- 
EMAIL:	stephen@comp.lancs.ac.uk	| Post: University of Lancaster,
UUCP:	...!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!stephen	|	Department of Computing,
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