Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!oberon!orion.cf.uci.edu!paris.ics.uci.edu!nagel
From: nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Who guards the distribution
Message-ID: <980@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 26 Nov 88 21:00:23 GMT
References: <432@kl-cs.UUCP>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: nagel@paris.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Organization: University of California, Irvine - Dept of ICS
Lines: 31
In-reply-to: jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight)

In article <432@kl-cs.UUCP>, jonathan@cs (Jonathan Knight) writes:
|Hi there.  I would like to know who is supposed to decide
|whether an article gets propagated or not.  Over here in the
|UK I'm getting articles for groups ny.*, seattle.*, wi.*, att.*, 
|and a host of other distributions which I not supposed to get at all.
|Sites have processed these articles who are outside the distribution
|but all the sites passed them on, which is a waste of time and money.
|
|What I'd like to know is: is the receiving site supposed to decide
|if the article should be accepted, or should the sending site
|decide whether to transmit it in the first place.  The first
|method saves time and money in transmitting useless articles,
|while the second method allows the receiving site to decide whether
|to have a newsgroup without involving anyone else.

Each site decides what distribution to send to each of its
neighbors.  If your neighbor is in the usa distribution as are
you, then you exchange the usa distribution, and so on.  What
you've observed is that some people like to crosspost to local
and non-local newsgroups.  Then, the group name is carried along
to the non-local group and appears in the news logs as a bad
group name.  It's even more fun when, as has happened here
occassionally, someone crossposts to a local and non-local group
and you happen to have the local group as one of your own local
groups.  People write me letters asking why something from
Georgia ends up in our ics.general group.  I tell 'em I just work
here and scratch my head.  Seems to work... :-)

Mark Nagel @ UC Irvine, Dept of Info and Comp Sci
ARPA: nagel@ics.uci.edu              | radiation: n. ... 2. smog with an
UUCP: {sdcsvax,ucbvax}!ucivax!nagel  | attitude.