Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ames!oliveb!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Re: patch to prevent userid censorship via expire(8) Message-ID: <1452@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: Fri, 28-Aug-87 12:43:30 EDT Article-I.D.: epimass.1452 Posted: Fri Aug 28 12:43:30 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 30-Aug-87 02:23:22 EDT References: <1680@ho95e.ATT.COM> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 37 Keywords: censorship silencing Summary: purpose of the -f flag Xref: mnetor news.admin:939 news.software.b:787 In article <1680@ho95e.ATT.COM> wcs@ho95e.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart) writes: >In <12916@amdahl.amdahl.com>, Gordon Moffett writes: >: I've always looked upon this flag with horror, and now I see realized >: my objections to having it in the first place: censorship. > >The purpose of the -f flag is not to censor real people such as Mr. Nobody >or Rich Rosen; it's mainly to censor berserk notesfile gateways and similar >programs, which occasionally break and dump 85 Megabytes worth of old >articles, all of which appear to be from notesfiles@somewherevax. >It's worth keeping for that reason, on spite of the risk of abuse. The example on the official expire man page demonstrates how to censor Rich Rosen! When I was hacking on the beta release of 2.11, I asked Rick Adams to change the example; possibly because of an oversight, it was never changed. Here it is: -f asks expire to remove messages sent by a particular user, regardless of the newsgroup that they are in, and regardless of how old they are. This option is intended not so much to selectively censor voluminous posters (though it has certainly been used for that) but to recover when a notesfiles site (running different news software) accidentally releases a duplicate batch of old news. An example of its use is expire -f rlr@pyuxd.UUCP Any article whose From: field exactly matches the argument to the -f option will be removed. Seems it would have been more consistent to give the example expire -f Unknown@hplabs.UUCP (remember that one?) if this really isn't about censorship. -- - Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com {uunet,ucbvax,sun,decwrl,}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck Old arpa mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net