spaf@gatech.CSNET (Gene Spafford) (10/21/85)
You have already seen (or soon will see) newgroup messages for 18 new
moderated groups. They are legit. As was discussed in net.news.group
for the last few weeks, the changeover from "fa" style groups to "mod"
style groups has begun. The new "mod" groups (and
net.announce.arpa-internet) are for gatewayed news articles from
Arpa/Internet discussion lists. In a few days, you will also see a
group of "rmgroup" messages for your existing "fa" groups. By the end
of the month, no "fa" group should still exist in that form.
I will issue a special edition of the "List of Active Lists" and
"Checkgroups" message in a few days to help you sort it out. I will
also issue a special edition of the list of moderated newsgroups which
will include directions on how to submit articles so that they get to
the moderator on the Arpa/Internet side, and thus into the newsgroup on
both networks. These will appear in the group "mod.newslists".
For those of you who don't read net.news.group, let me summarize some
of the major reasons why this change is occuring:
1) It more closely reflects the nature of these groups. All
Arpa/Internet discussion lists are moderated, and articles
submitted to the group must be mailed to the moderator. That
wasn't clear with the "fa" groups, but it is precisely what is
supposed to occur with "mod" groups.
2) In this form, the 2.10.2 and 2.10.3 news software supports
submission to these groups. There was no way to support posting
an article to a "fa" group (or post a followup) unless the user
happened to know how to get directly to the moderator on the Arpa
side, or unless the user knew the address on ucbvax which would
gateway the submission. With the "mod" groups, simply putting the
moderator name and path in the "moderators" file on each machine
will result in "postnews" and "Pnews" (from Larry Wall's "rn"
package) being usable to submit articles. And yes, there is now a
reliable mechanism to get mail from uucp-only sites to the
moderators on the Arpa sites -- I will explain in the posting of
the moderators file in mod.newslists in a few days.
3) We can trim all the old dependencies out of the news software
which recognized and dealt with "fa" groups. That should help
reduce the size of the code and complexity of the software for
release 2.10.3 and beyond.
4) Advances in news software and mailers have made it possible to
make this work correctly for the first time. This is probably
close to the way the groups would have been set up originally had
only the software been in a mature enough state.
5) Better naming. Besides providing a beter structure, this also
allows some opportunity to provide a more explanative name for some
of these groups. Our experience has shown that (for instance) some
people thought "fa.sun-spots" was for astronomy buffs, and that
"fa.laser-lovers" was for physicists. The new names,
"mod.computers.sun" and "mod.computers.laser-printers" should be
more easily understood by someone who hasn't looked though the list
of groups recently.
If you have any questions or comments, direct them to me, or to Erik
Fair (fair@ucbvax.UUCP).
----
Gene Spafford
The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
CSNet: Spaf @ GATech ARPA: Spaf%GATech.CSNet @ CSNet-Relay.ARPA
uucp: ...!{akgua,decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!spaf
--
Gene "sometime in 1986" Spafford
The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
CSNet: Spaf @ GATech ARPA: Spaf%GATech.CSNet @ CSNet-Relay.ARPA
uucp: ...!{akgua,decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!spaf