Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!rutgers!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Re: Using "local" as a newsgroup name considered harmful Message-ID: <7162@e.ms.uky.edu> Date: Wed, 26-Aug-87 15:41:17 EDT Article-I.D.: e.7162 Posted: Wed Aug 26 15:41:17 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 28-Aug-87 06:35:25 EDT References: <434@acornrc.UUCP> <8481@utzoo.UUCP> <2007@lsuc.UUCP> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 74 Xref: mnetor news.admin:916 news.software.b:784 In article <2007@lsuc.UUCP> dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman) writes: >Henry Spencer (utzoo!henry) writes: >> ... Unfortunately, it is difficult to devise another solution that really >>works without unfortunate side effects. ... >Yeah. What about looking at the domain of the poster in the From: >line when you receive the article, and making a decision based >on that as to whether to post to the local group a cross-posted article >which includes a locallish-distribution group? (For sanity protection, >don't invoke this test at all unless the article is cross-posted to >both a wide and a narrow distribution.) > >To keep this information current, have a file with "known" >problems. For example, U of Toronto sites would have, in the "zap this" >file, >ut .texas.edu > ... Similarly, the people at Kentucky would have >uk .uk >while those in Britain would have >uk .uky.edu > >The file would be updated by the sysadmins every time >a new duplication problem surfaced. I don't really like this solution as it is the same sort of thing as having to know the paths around the network ... the network is getting too big in order for us to know what all is out there. (BTW, it's "utexas.edu" not "texas.edu" :-) ...). In addition, not all of the distributions are attached to particular domains ... For instance, in KY we have a "ky" distribution. This distribution crosses a number of domains. There is also the "alt" distribution which crosses a number of domains. If the maker of "ky-jelly" were to make an internal "ky" distribution then we might start seeing crosspostings here. :-) [I'm just being devils advocate at the moment and pointing at some problems ... I also realize that we've only ever had one bout of accidental cross-postings into our internal newsgroups in the 2 yrs or so we've had internal newsgroups. I could certainly live with making one entry into a file to cover further cross-postings. On the other hand, I wonder if people in the United Kingdom will see this posting as I've cross-posted it into uk.news. The "uk.news" group in the UK is probably much busier than our local newsgroups. My experience with our local newsgroups is probably the exception rather than the rule ... For awhile we were getting leakage from internal newsgroups at GaTech and was seeing quite a bit of traffic in those newsgroups ... a whole lot more than our internal newsgroups get.] >The only problem I see is that if joe@texas.edu posts to >ut.general,comp.misc, and fred@toronto.edu reads the article >in comp.misc, the header will still mention ut.general (thus >preserving the article in case it goes back into the Texas >distribution, in theory), but fred will not be able to find >it there if he goes looking. Not a serious problem, in my view. Neither in my view either. -- ----- David Herron, Local E-Mail Hack, david@ms.uky.edu, david@ms.uky.csnet ----- {uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET ----- ----- Je parle francais comme une vache espagnole.