[news.software.b] Distributions - what is the correct way to handle them

nigelm@ohm.york.ac.uk (Nigel Metheringham) (05/30/91)

I have noticed in many of the examples people give of the way to
handle distributions in sys files, the basic technique is to allow
all distributions, and then reject specific ones that you don't want
fed to neighbouring sites.

When I set news up here I started the other way round.  I allow the
following distributions only:-
	local	- obvious really (department)
	campus	- all machines on this campus
	uk	- everything in this country
	eunet	- all european sites
	world	- everyone

I have had a couple of complaints from users about followups to
articles with distributions of (say) comp - the followups end up
being kept local and not being passed on to our neighbours, and no
warning is given to the submitter.  My own feeling is that the
newsgroup heirarchy distribution names are broken, and if you want
to get stuff out of this machine then you are going to have to live
with the way the system handles things.  However I now feed a site
who are presumably not seeing some of the news coming into our
machine 'cos the distributions are wrong.

What is the general view on the best way of handling this - should it
be similar to the recent C-News date saga - ie force people to fix
broken software, or should I be less dictatorial?

FYI I am running C-News from about last september (ie so far without
the date patches in!).

	Nigel.

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