Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!tale From: tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: article changes by moderator -- either timestamp or content Summary: moderators can use Sender: field Message-ID: <~#}VS@rpi.edu> Date: 17 Dec 89 19:35:10 GMT References: <1989Dec17.172253.21978@NCoast.ORG> Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY Lines: 48 In <1989Dec17.172253.21978@NCoast.ORG> allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery): > You'd probably hate comp.sources.misc even more, because articles go > out with *my* name on them. There's a good reason for that, too: if > something has to be canceled for some reason [...] I need to be the > article's "owner" or I can't cancel it. More precisely, the Sender, or From if no Sender, headers should agree. Some news systems don't even check that since cancel messages are so ridiculously simple to forge. A lot of newsreaders have a hard time dealing with the theoretical rules, though. In rn, local users who post using NNTP's mini-inews often can't cancel their articles from rn because it sees the Sender: line as usenet@wherever. In GNUS, even when the Sender: line indicates the user attempting the cancel, it won't let you if the From: line doesn't match. > And while I was able to fudge around that when c.s.m was run from > ncoast, Rick Adams would take a rather dim view of my forging cancel > messages on uunet. It _isn't_ a forgery. Dan Heller (comp.sources.x) and I just had a discussion about this a couple of months ago. The Sender: line was provided for expressly the purpose of making postings for other people. The fact that it is so often filled with {news,daemon,usenet}@site is a side-effect of NNTP posting. If you set the Sender: line to yourself before issuing the posting, and make the From: line the name of the submitter, it is not a forgery either then or when you send a cancel. > So I *have* to be the poster-of- record. (The actual submitter is > always listed in the "Submitted-by:" auxiliary header.) Dan and I got into the discussion when he was bemoaning how many people think that he wrote the packages posted. Making From: the user who submitted the package provides information to news readers in a manner they are accustomed to receiving it. Replies to the author of the package are easier, KILL files work more efficiently (ie, no scanning the body of the article for Submitted-by:) if you are so inclined to nuke sources by programmer, and summaries (like = in rn) provide a little bit more information. > You'd be amazed how much of a moderator's job is constrained by the > capabilities, or lack thereof, of the Usenet news system. True enough, but this is not one of those cases. Dave -- (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))