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From: jon@gaia.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: A minor gripe with moderated group handling
Message-ID: <283@gaia.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 15-Feb-87 15:07:52 EST
Article-I.D.: gaia.283
Posted: Sun Feb 15 15:07:52 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Feb-87 07:02:53 EST
Organization: Gaia Corp, Boulder, CO
Lines: 32

News 2.11 added a wonderful feature for coping with moderated groups, by
transparently packaging a submission to such a group into a mail message
and sending it to the local backbone, where an alias has presumably been
set up.  It is a nice feature in that it takes away the need to worry about
which groups are moderated, and how to get to the moderator.

The problem is that the subject line of the generated mail message is
something along the lines of "submission for mod-computers-vax".  This,
coupled with the fact that a number of "moderated" groups are, in fact,
not moderated, makes for some aggravation.  For example, the ARPA
INFO-VAX mailing list is called 'mod.computers.vax,' and is marked moderated.
However, all it really is is a mail alias that bounces messages back to
the list.  Thus, mod.computers.vax is now full of messages for which the
subject line is "Submission for mod-computers-vax."  Not very helpful.  I,
for one, have gone back to mailing directly to the "moderator" for such
groups, since I would rather that my postings have useful subject lines.
Thus, the purpose for the new feature has been defeated.

I see two ways that this could be deal with this.  One would be to just have
the subject line of the generated mail message be the real subject of the
posting.  I don't know how much trouble this would be for the real, human
moderators out there.  The other is to have a new entry for the "moderated"
field in the active file which would mark groups that are not moderated,
but which do need to be posted to through a mail message.

Neither hack sounds that difficult.  If there is any consensus out there about
how to deal with this, I guess I could go ahead and fix it, and send the diffs
back to Rick Adams.  Any comments?
-- 
Jonathan Corbet
{seismo | hplabs | gatech}!hao!gaia!jon
{ucbvax | allegra | cbosgd}!nbires!gaia!jon