Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!apple!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Use of 'all' distribution in sys Message-ID: <2964@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 13 Mar 89 22:50:42 GMT References: <304@flatline.UUCP> <2004@wa4mei.UUCP> <1247@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 19 In article <1247@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> "David Wright" writes: >What is wrong with 'all', *if* you specifically exclude local groups? The situation may be different in the UK, but here we have a wide variety of local distributions ("nj" for New Jersey, "ba" for the San Francisco Bay Area) and special-interest distributions ("alt", "biz", etc). A lot of the problems we're having with distributions relate to too many admins putting "all" in their sys files (hence "Car for Sale" ads going to the whole word, etc). If the net were static, it wouldn't matter. The difference between all, plus a lot of "!group" modifiers, and specifying groups explicitly, is what happens when someone adds new groups or new distributions. You'll either send by default, or not. Given the traffic explosion on the net, I suggest that not sending by default is a better move (do all your downstream neighbors want all the groups in the new "whizbang" alternate newsgroup hierarchy?). -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck