lmb@vicom.COM (Larry Blair) (04/26/89)
Gee... yet another piece of mail telling me to change a moderated group to unmoderated because some Bozo doesn't know how to use inews. The most interesting thing about these postings usually are the string of former backbone sites in the path. These screwups are the major reason I can't let newgroup messages for the mainstream distributions get executed on my system. Isn't it time that we did something about this? One plan of attack is to change inews to prevent the posting of newgroup/ rmgroup messages with a distribution other than local. The big problem here is that there is no way to change inews on every system on the net, so scratch this one. Another idea is to intercept the messages before they go into wide distribution. If major distribution points could be encouraged to add a patch to their inews (or whatever the C news and 3.0 equivalents are) that would prevent passing any newgroup or rmgroup that didn't contain some magic string, only postings with the string intentionally added would get wide distribution. The idea is to stop Bozos, not prevent newgroups. I'll be glad to work out the patch and distribute it as needed. We need to agree on the magic string. Personally, I'd be happy with "Approved: spaf" but I'm open to suggestions. -- Larry Blair ames!vsi1!lmb lmb@vicom.com