Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!emv From: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) Newsgroups: alt.sources.d Subject: Re: Stupid reposting service (was Re: SLIP/getty/printers on Ter Message-ID: Date: 15 Dec 89 21:58:13 GMT References: <9080@leadsv.UUCP> <1989Dec15.194952.13579@twwells.com> <15006@bfmny0.UU.NET> Sender: news@math.lsa.umich.edu Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor MI. Lines: 47 In-reply-to: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET's message of 15 Dec 89 21:23:03 GMT In article <15006@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes: It's worth pointing out in all contexts -- but especially in the realm of large source postings -- that news articles don't arrive at sites cost free, KILL files notwithstanding. Cross posting allows articles to appear in multiple useful places with only the cost of one distribution, but RE-posted sources from some individual newsreader's site forces people to bear the cost of two distributions, unless they want to forgo the use of the group (which means missing original postings too). Too true. It is a potential waste of bandwidth to shovel things around twice, so the solution will have to be a way to not send the reposted articles in the first place. The easy (and somewhat brute-force) way is to stop getting alt.sources entirely, but that's overkill for sure; you're likely to miss a lot of good stuff that way. Somewhat more trickly but still doable is to wipe out articles coming from the offending site, with a B news sys file something like this on your upstream feed(s): yoursite:world,...,alt,!alt.sources,... yoursite/offending-reposting-site:world,alt.sources,... where 'offending-reposting-site' is the name in the Path: header which is responsible for the errand deed. There's a risk to this; the miscreant might actually post something useful from that site, so you could wipe out too much. If anyone's contemplating this approach, let me know, and I'll change the Path: headers that I'm creating from the generic ones I have now to tack in a different one that's only ever going to occur in the context of reposted articles. I'll probably make it go from Path: math.lsa.umich.edu!emv to Path: math.lsa.umich.edu!derrida.math.lsa.umich.edu!emv so you can put yoursite/derrida.math.lsa.umich.edu:.... in your sys file. It's too bad there isn't the equivalent of kill files for news relaying -- if I were to get a newsfeed at home I might want to have a news clip type service run on the feeder machine and have it send me only what I want from the newsgroups I'm interested in. Anyone have this running now ? --Ed