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From: rsk@s.cc.purdue.edu (Whitewater Wombat)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: The Mythical Megabyte-Day (Re: Abuse of Expires:)
Message-ID: <694@s.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: Sun, 9-Aug-87 04:58:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: s.694
Posted: Sun Aug  9 04:58:43 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Aug-87 22:02:41 EDT
References: <499@wolf.UUCP> <316@brandx.rutgers.edu> <5092@j.cc.purdue.edu> <317@brandx.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: rsk@s.cc.purdue.edu.UUCP (Whitewater Wombat)
Organization: Purdue University Computing Center
Lines: 52
Summary: Flame.

In article <317@brandx.rutgers.edu> webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber) writes:
>In article <5092@j.cc.purdue.edu>, rsk@j.cc.purdue.edu (Whitewater Wombat) writes:
>> The moderator of these two groups is Craig Norborg, doc@j.cc.purdue.edu.
>> I'm his boss, and news administrator to boot.  I have ... instructed
>> Craig to use the default expiration parameters only.
>Your description of your position in the above quote seems to boil
>down to you justifying your tampering with a moderated news stream purely
>on the basis of ``might makes right.''  Is this the full extent of your
>position or is there something I am missing?

You're missing one hell of a lot.  *Your* description of your position
seems to imply that I can't tell someone who works for me what to do
(within reasonable bounds).  I'm sorry if you don't like it, but you
don't have to--the decision has been made and it is going to stick.

[It has been pointed out to me that some sites archive-on-expire, and
that the cancel messages I sent will cause the lossage of a few articles,
resulting in slightly increased mail traffic as those few sites catch up
by getting some of the articles from the moderator.  I don't anticipate
that to be too much of a problem, as I estimate the number of sites that
archive to be a much much smaller number than the number of sites that
receive the *.amiga groups.]

Let me point out that I am *correcting* a sort of "tampering"--i.e.,
the use of explicit [long] expiration dates to cause *.amiga articles
to hang around much longer than articles in other moderated source groups.
[Not that I really like the use of the word "tampering" in this context,
but what the hell.]  If *you* want these articles around for a long time,
then *you* can archive them at your site.

Now, this may seem like "might makes right"--and maybe it is.  Frankly,
I don't really care what you think of that approach--this isn't your
site, it's *mine*, and I'll decide what emanates from these machines,
thank you very much.  That means that I do things like cancelling outbound
articles when I notice someone avoiding the "quoted text limit" or posting
to wildly inappropriate newsgroups or doing other not-so-terrific things.
I do this because I have the time (usually) and because I'd like to
think that articles coming from *.cc.purdue.edu adhere somewhat to the
guidelines posted in news.announce.newusers.  I'd like to think that
we're reasonably good "neighbors" on Usenet, and that we don't spew
trash all over the network.  [Please note, censorship paranoids, that I
have never cancelled an article because of content.]

Finally, let me conclude by noting that I don't really care what *you*
think of my position; I care about what Gene and Chuq and Mark and
Greg and John and some other folks out there think, because (1) I value
their experience with Usenet, and (2) respect the work they've put into it.
I hardly think you qualify on either count.

-- 
Rich Kulawiec, rsk@j.cc.purdue.edu, j.cc.purdue.edu!rsk
PUCC News Administrator