Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!unisoft!gethen!farren
From: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Patch for inews (was Re: Final action on soc.sex)
Message-ID: <862@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 88 18:08:01 GMT
References: <3720@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <1988Apr6.171345.3827@sq.uucp> <2216@inco.UUCP>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 29

In article <2216@inco.UUCP> mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) writes:
>This article contains a patch to News 2.11, patchlevel 14, which solves
>both of these problems by allowing sites to transmit articles posted to
>locally nonexistent groups.

I'm sorry - I don't quite understand what this gains you.  If the 
upstream site has decided not to carry a full feed, wouldn't they
be rather leery of installing such a patch?  There are many reasons
other than censorship for limiting a feed, you know - I don't carry
soc.all or talk.all because I simply do not have enough disk space
for them.  If someone downstream from me tried to make an end-run
around my limitation by using your patch, I can assure you that two
things would happen right away: first, their articles would vanish
into thin air as soon as they hit my machine (I expire junk daily,
and will continue to do so); and second, their status as a feed would
vanish as soon as I caught on to what they were trying to do.
If they were courteous enough to call and ask first, they might not
want to put in the patch at all - because it wouldn't do them a bit
of good.

I also have to put in a comment here - the content of alt.sex so far
indicates to me that the backbone sites were quite correct in their
decision.  Whatever happened to the newsgroup that was supposed to
have serious talk about sexuality issues?

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
{ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}!     | dogmatize it!  Reflect on it and re-evaluate
        unisoft!gethen!farren | it.  You may want to change your mind someday."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame