warren@ihnss.UUCP (Warren Montgomery) (01/04/84)
I have noticed for some time that articles posted to multiple newsgroups either directly or through followups can sometimes end up in strange places. For example, if someone posts to "general", and "net.lan", indicating some event of local interest and general interest only to local area network fans, the article shows up in "general" in every machine that it visits. This behavior has caused concerns over netnews security in the past when followups to articles that were posted to both company private and net categories show up in the company private category later on. I think that this behavior is confusing and not intended. I would suggest the following be considered as a fix: Filter the newsgroups list of a recieved article by some appropriate list. The sys file entry for the system from which the article is received is probably appropriate in most cases, though it may be appropriate to filter by the list of allowed local newsgroups, or by some new list. The disallowed newsgroups would be removed from the article before any forwarding or local display. This means that If I were to post an article to "general", "ih.general", "btl.general", and "net.general", it would lose the general category as soon as it left my machine, the ih.general category when it left my company location, and the btl.general category when it left my company. If someone from outside were to post a followup, it would come back only in "net.general". This behavior seems much more consistent than the current behavior when compared to what happens to articles posted to individual groups. I am not volunteering to implement it, as I have been out of the netnews programming game for too long, but would appreciate any reactions from users or netnews implementers. -- Warren Montgomery ihnss!warren IH x2494
thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas) (01/05/84)
Here is a proposal: have netnews "invisibly" prefix all local groups with the machine name. Then postings to "net.lan,general" on machine foo will not show up in machine bar's general because "foo.general" won't match "bar.general". Of course, if you have a machine called "net"... :-) Maybe make that local-<machine-id>.<newsgroup>, or something. Comments? =Spencer
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (01/06/84)
The behavior is intentional, it has to keep all the newsgroups on there so that followups go to all of them. However, when Solomon posted the article to net.news.b,general, it showed up in general on some machines. This is the misfeature of the method. But it didn't show up in general on cbosgd. Why? Apparently because the "sys" file on cbosgd does not have "all" in the cbosgd line, but rather cbosgd:net,mod,fa,bell,att,abbl,btl,cb,osg,to:: listing the groups that will be accepted. Thus, it didn't get localized in "general", but it did get stored with the Newsgroups line reading "net.news.b,general", forwarded intact, and followups will go to both. While renaming local newsgroups like "general" to "cbosgd.general" seems like a good idea, a reasonable fix is probably to fix your sys file. Mark
crp@stcvax.UUCP (Charlie Price) (01/06/84)
> Here is a proposal: have netnews "invisibly" prefix all local groups > with the machine name. One problem that we might have with this is that we have our development spread across a couple machines and they share all of the local newsgroups like "general". The wrong implementation of an "invisible" prefix would make that difficult or impossible. If done "right" for us, this would involve yet another configuration parameter. Do other sites have multiple distinct machines that are "local" to each other? A second problem that some sites might have would be experienced by a machine that I saw in net.news.newsite just today: onyx. The natural company distribution class would also be "onyx" and they would have a problem. Future site names could avoid this problem, of course, but who knows how many existing sites would be affected. I think the original proposed solution, adjusting the newsgroups based on the sys file line (or whatever), makes more sense and is a more correct implementation of what the intent of such a multiple posting was done with. This works for followups to the more global group. This doesn't address the problem of posting to, say, "net.wanted" and "wanted" and having followups in "wanted" also followup to "net.wanted". I don't think it is a good idea to post to a local and more global newsgroup at the same time anyway. Local groups are local for a reason and it is hard to see what articles they would reasonably share. I don't know that complicating the followup mechanism, by following up only to the local group in this case, is really the answer, either. -- Charlie Price - STC (disk division) uucp: { decvax, hao}!stcvax!crp { allegra, amd70, ucbvax }!nbires!stcvax!crp USnail: Storage Technology Corp - MD 3T / Louisville, CO / 80028 DDD: (303) 673-5698
phil@amd70.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (01/07/84)
Do we want followups to go to both net.news.b and general?
My general isn't your general, there is an implied context
which changes when the article gets transmitted from machine
to machine which is currently ignored by the news system.
--
Phil Ngai (408) 988-7777 {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amd70!phillee@rochester.UUCP (Lee Moore) (01/11/84)
I understand what Mark Horton is saying but there must be a better way. At the very least, it should be an option to strip off groups at boundries. My problem is the following: we use notes for some of our news groups. Now suppose that an article comes along that is in more than one group AND that one of these groups has a corresponding notesfile and one of these groups doesn't. Notes will now complain that it has received an article for a group that it doesn't know about. This didn't start happening until last year. Acutally the problem is more worse than this because of interactions with the "distribution" field but this was previously declared a bug. -- = lee@rochester rochester!lee =