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From: dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: What to do with unknown newsgroups.
Message-ID: <759@rayssd.RAY.COM>
Date: Tue, 17-Mar-87 14:03:11 EST
Article-I.D.: rayssd.759
Posted: Tue Mar 17 14:03:11 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Mar-87 01:13:16 EST
References: <43152@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> <297@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Sender: dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley @ Raytheon Company, Portsmouth RI)
Reply-To: dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley)
Organization: Raytheon Company, Portsmouth RI
Lines: 34

In article <297@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk> stephen@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Stephen J. Muir) writes:
>In article <43152@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) writes:
>>Does anyone still think that the unknown groups should be preserved or
>>should a future patch remove the unknown newsgroups?
>
>It should remove them.  A more important reason is that, for example, although
>Europe doesn't get talk.* newsgroups, many sites think we do because of the
>cross-posted articles from other newsgroups we *do* get!  Then these users post
>to a talk.* newsgroup and those articles get junked with no warning to the
>poster.

To get the most functionality, I think the software should do both.  The unknown
group should be preserved in the copy of the message that is sent on to other
sites but should be removed in the copy that is stored locally.  This way, the
other sites can still see the cross posting if they want to but local users are
not confused by the strange newsgroups name.  Unfortunately, I realize that this
would probably require some extensive changes to rnews/inews since the copy passed
along to other machines would now be different than the one stored locally.

>Also, my /usr/lib/news/errlog keeps filling up with "unknown newsgroup
>talk.whatever not localized".  This file should not grow quickly or news
>administrators will be discouraged from looking at it.

This doesn't seem like a real big problem to me.  I have an awk program that runs
every night that analyzes the log file and sends me a summary via email.  If my
site did not support the talk. groups I would just add a line to the awk script
that recognized "unknown newsgroup talk." and threw it away.  It doesn't take
much effort to write an awk script to analyze the log file, you can probably even
use the ones Erik Fair wrote (they have been posted to the net a couple of times).
-- 
David H. Brierley
Raytheon Submarine Signal Division; Portsmouth RI; (401)-847-8000 x4073
smart mailer or arpanet: dhb@rayssd.ray.com
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