Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Cabals, Committees, Voting, ad nauseum Message-ID: Date: 11 Apr 89 16:10:51 GMT References: <6503@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <647@ultb.UUCP> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Followup-To: news.admin Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 20 In-reply-to: lmb7421@ultb.UUCP's message of 10 Apr 89 19:07:08 GMT In article <647@ultb.UUCP> lmb7421@ultb.UUCP (L.M. Barstow) writes: ...rmgroup could be made automatic (a control message of some sort could be easily inserted into the news packet format, I believe) to prevent problems of scattered sections of old dead groups... All control messages are, as you put it, automatic. newgroup and rmgroup can be disallowed at each site, and reserved for root intervention, at compile time. Recent patches of 2.11 enable them to be allowed or disallowed at a distribution granularity. For example, you could allow auto-{new,rm}group in alt.all only, but require root intervention in all other distributions. Scattered pockets of dead groups happen when people disallow automatic rmgroups and don't keep up with them manually. ...a similar group of control blocks could shift the addresses of moderated groups to new sites, etc.... This would be much harder to implement, and it seems that the current mailpaths/"backbone" arrangement is working fine.