bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (06/11/83)
About the only good thing about having the distribution of a group tied in with the subject of it is that you can recognize when a group should not be forwarded and strip it from a newsgroup list that contains groups that should. This is no longer being done. This causes several problems. One is that a message to "net.auto,general" ends up in the "general" group in EVERY site. The other is that the junk group is filling up with articles for "nj.general" and "btl.foobar" because there are postings to these groups and a net group. -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304
ka@spanky.UUCP (06/13/83)
Alas, yes. In release 2.9, there was a problem posting to multiple groups. Let's say I post an article to nj.events,net.sf-lovers. When the article leaves New Jersey, the nj.events newsgroup will be stripped off. If the article re-enters New Jersey, peolpe who subscribe to nj.events but not net.sf-lovers will not see the article. The solution proposed by Mark Horton in the USENET Interchange Standard was to not strip the newsgroup name off. This works as long as all newsgroup names are unique throughout the net, and has the additional advantage of allowing a site to send identical copies of an article to all it's neighbors. Currently newsgroup names are not unique. Making them unique involves two steps. First, local groups should have the local site name included in the group name. (Thus general becomes spanky.general on spanky). Second, other non-netwide distributions should be centrally registered to avoid duplication. Kenneth Almquist