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From: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.misc
Subject: Re: Dropping alt groups
Message-ID: <14014@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 8 Sep 88 07:11:11 GMT
References: <9536@tness7.UUCP> <6300@gryphon.CTS.COM> <1179@bellboy.UUCP> <496@mipseast.mips.COM> <9650@tness7.UUCP>
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Reply-To: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
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In-reply-to: mechjgh@tness7.UUCP (Greg Hackney )

In article <9650@tness7.UUCP>, mechjgh@tness7 (Greg Hackney ) writes:
>It's not a question of being fired. It's a question as to whether
>bucks will be budgeted to support Usenet in free public service.
>It's difficult to present netnews to management as a wonderful thing
>of great value, to claim to them that we need to drop bucks to set
>up some gateways, and have them look at news for the first time
>and pull up alt.weemba.sheep that has gotten created overnight.

Hahaha!

This is really funny!!

This whole stink you brought up is nothing other than bad timing???

SHeesh.  Why is this any different than the time some major Denver
site pulled all of USENET since some upper management was offended
by un-rot13-ed dirty jokes???

I have no idea who went on an orgy of alt.weemba.* newgrouping, but
to hear the above hard luck story sure makes it worth it.  Hahaha!!

Isn't it time that hide-from-management features were installed?
You know, like the Boss-is-coming key in various games?  Just like
there's a FASCIST option to block posting, maybe there should be
a DWEEBIST option to secretly hide the more trouble-inducing parts
of Usenet from those awful dweebs who-just-dont-UNNERSTAN?

Let's see:

(*) Newgroups are offered only upon sysadmin approval.
(*) Rot13-ing doesn't work.
(*) Postings with obscene language are never visible.
(*) {alt,talk,soc,rec}.* (cross)postings are never visible.
(*) Certain voluminous posters are never visible.

It wouldn't be too hard to implement a first approximation to this in
rn or Gnews or 3.0 rnews: there'd be a file /usr/lib/news/dweeb-kill,
and a list of dweebs /usr/lib/news/dweeb-list, and anyone on the list
gets the indicated dweeb KILLs applied globally.  A sysadmin could fine
tune this as desired.

ucbvax!garnet!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720