[news.sysadmin] Stopping mistaken crossposted followups

msb@sq.uucp (Mark Brader) (06/10/88)

> Also, as an added bonus (for more radical sys[sic]admins), if 
> you #define FIX_XPOST, inews will also automagically add a 
> "Followup-To" to news articles comming in from other sites.
> That will keep you from forwarding articles that are cross-posted
> without a "Followup-To".

No newsadmin should do this without the consent of *all* sites that
might be downstream from them.  This is *not* a "harmless correction";
the existing posting software makes it nontrivial to add a Followup-To
line, and a poster who wants followups to go to both groups should
not need to override what some misguided downstream site might do.

Radical indeed.  What comes next -- filtering the article body through a
spelling corrector program, to reduce spelling flames?  [rhetorical question]

One *more* time: cross-posting is not a problem, it's a feature.
Incoming articles should not be modified by inews.  Improper cross-posting
happens, but the place to fix it is in the news *posting* software.

As a test, this article has been posted with no Followup-To line.
If it has one when it arrives at your site, it has been tampered with
along the way!

(The very idea of discussing the topic in the groups to which this was
posted, rather than in news.misc, strikes me as being in the same
misguided spirit as the original suggestion, but I refuse to add a
fourth newsgroup to a posting without a Followup-To line.  I suggest
that any followups go to news.admin only.)

Mark Brader, Toronto		sed -e "s;??\\([-=(/)'<!>]\\);?\\\\?\\1;g"
utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com	will fix them...	-- Karl Heuer