romain@pyramid.pyramid.com (Romain Kang) (03/20/89)
Junk can be caused by things that cannot be fixed. Can you say "inet leakage"? pyrnj gets about 600-700KB of inet leakage from rutgers during an average week. Remember, rutgers is a well-administered site by Usenet standards, run by diligent and knowledgeable staff. (It makes me worry to think what promoting all the inet newsgroups to full Usenet might do to countless /usr/spool's around Usenet.) Here's something from pyramid's sys file, to serve as guardian of the corporate decorum. You can't do this for all the inet newsgroups -- the list is too long to fit LBUFLEN. junk:junk,alt.birthright,alt.california,alt.flame,alt.individualism,\ alt.rhode_island,alt.rock-n-roll,alt.sex,talk.bizarre:U:rm -f /tmp/%s %s pyrnj handles inet leakage by aliasing all of those groups to the "inet." prepended to the group name. Before every sendbatch, a script runs to remove the prefix from newly arrived inet articles, preventing bogus group names from going back into Usenet if an inet newsgroup has been cross-posted with regular Usenet. This way I can isolate the inet newsgroups, and conceivably feed them downstream of pyrnj if desired, without excess inet propagation. Crufty? To the max! But no one's complained since I starting repairing the newsgroup names. -- Now for a version of expire that runs on the kitchen memo board...