peirce@gumby.cc.wmich.edu (Leonard J. Peirce) (02/17/89)
A while ago, I wrote: > >Now that we have ANU News for VMS up and running, we have the capability >to allow ALL of the users here (approx. 15,000) access to news. Before we >do that, however, I was wondering what policies (if any) regarding access to >news are in place at other universites (or any other sites, for that matter). > I was delighted to receive so many replies so quickly; a summary follows. Thanx to everyone who took the time to respond. =============================================================================== kathy@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Kathryn Smith): You'll probably get this suggestion at least 47 more times from other people, but just in case... I realize it's probably impossible for you to effectively enforce this, but THE most helpful and civilized thing an administrator can do before turning thousands of neophytes loose on the news utilities is to at least TRY and get them to read the introductory posting on netiquette. I don't know enough about you computer center to even contemplate concrete suggestions for how to accomplish this (and believe me, I do appreciate how difficult it is to get even experienced users to look at the documentation), if you succeed in getting even a third of them to pay attention, you will have done us all a big favor. tar@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (Tim Ramsey): I'm the news admin for this department (and sort of the de-facto admin for this campus). Two departments on this campus receive a news feed from us. Faculty, staff, and graduate students have full reading and posting privileges. Undergrads generally don't have posting privileges, although some undergrads are trying to have this restriction removed (with my support). Early on, our department head expressed concern over using state equipment and resources to store and transmit groups like talk.*, soc.*, and alt.sex. After consulting with the university legal department, he decided to allow these groups to remain on sort of a trial basis. So far there hasn't been any further problem with news or its contents. Jeanne A. E. DeVoto <jdevoto@apple.com>: My experience is that at most educational institutions, access to computer facilities is relatively open (modulo shortages). Net access generally follows this pattern: at most places, anyone who has an account can post/read news and send email. Problem posters are generally dealt with on a case by case basis (i.e. the default is to let everyone post, but if you get complaints about a user and they seem valid on investigation, you may want to take action ranging from restricting postings for a few weeks to kicking the user off your machines altogether). You will, of course, want to make sure new users are directed to the netiquette documents in news.announce.newusers before they even *think* about posting. amdcad!cdr@decwrl.dec.com (Carl Rigney): Before unleashing the hordes, you should make sure they've all read the articles in news.announce.newusers - force it to the front of their .newsrc if you can. At the very least they need to understand the differences between USEnet and BBSes, or you're likely to get your University a very bad reputation very quickly. It's probably unfair that people judge organizations by the people who post from them, but that's the way it is. You might want to restrict posting for the first month, and only let everyone read, so they get an idea of what's going on. I'd also recommend omitting alt.flame as needlessly provocative. After a month enable posting but keep an eye on the amount for a month or two. I don't recommend being fascist and choosing who will and who won't get net access - it's better to be fair and let all or none. But be aware that the major cause of cyclical discussions on the net is that there's a new crop of freshmen every fall, so it would be good if you can make sure that they read new.announce.newusers as well. jma%abel%manta.pha.pa.us%rutgers%mailrus.uucp@mailgw.cc.umich.edu (Jeff Abrahamson): At MIT (where I was before here), anyone who had access to a machine which ran news had access to all of usenet (as well as the arpanet, etc.) This includes, in particular, all undergraduates, without exception. ki4pv!tanner@bikini.cis.ufl.edu (Dr. T. Andrews): I think that you will probably find that no restrictions are placed on reading the news. You might do well to arrange for some sort of fascist posting scheme, where a human reviews the potential postings from students before they go out at large. vnend@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (D. W. James): As far as I know, there are no policies restricting usage here or at my previous school. (of course, UK had a significant restriction in that the machines with access to usenet were hard to get accounts on.) ficc!peter@uunet.UU.NET (Peter da Silva): We give everyone access to comp, news, and two local hierarchies. Bennett Todd <bet@orion.mc.duke.edu>: When we set up a large UNIX system for campus-wide access I was the system administrator at the time. I used the FASCIST option in Bnews 2.11 to allow me to set things up so that users were forbidden to post to groups that went off-machine unless they were in a special database (/usr/lib/news/authorized, as I recall). I then arranged the news installation so that it announced, when things (like posting to unauthorized groups) bombed, that the users should contact me via E-mail. I arranged (as described in the Bnews 2.11 documentation) to have the introductory documents be the first three articles in "general", which we don't expire, and which comes first in everyone's .newsrc by default. Finally, when users sent me mail asking why they couldn't post, I sent them a form letter response. It explained that I had disabled posting for everyone not specifically authorized to allow me to ensure that before participating in this world-wide community people learned how it worked, and how to give a good impression of themselves and our institution. I offered three choices for getting access to posting to USENET: 1) Summerize in their own words the contents of the "How to Use USENET Effectively" article (which I explained was article #2 in "general") 2) Propose an alternative test for users to indicate that they know their way around USENET 3) Convince me that having such a barrier in place is inappropriate. Finally, I encouraged them to send me mail whenever they had difficulties with the system, and encouraged them in particular to consider mailing me any elementary questions they might have rather than posting them to the net. I never got the faintest whisper of a complaint; people seemed to be appreciative of a tightly-run, well-supported system. Also, the burden wasn't too great; although we have a campus of some 20,000 students who could have gotten logins if they wished them, we only have some 800 accounts, and only 23 users have requested permission to post to USENET. This is after some 3 or 4 years. ====================================================================== While we haven't finalized our policy, we at least have a great wealth of information/experience to draw upon. Thanx again....:-) -- Leonard J. Peirce Internet: peirce@gumby.cc.wmich.edu Western Michigan University peirce@gw.wmich.edu Academic Computer Center Voice: (616) 387-5430 Kalamazoo, MI 49008