billw@killer.UUCP (Bill Wisner) (09/17/87)
At this time killer's spool directory for comp.mail.elm contains 218 articles. These are unexpired, friends; all were received within the last two weeks. Of these 218 articles, 14 are original postings. The rest are articles, with the Subject line reading "Submission for comp-mail-elm," that have been bounced by uucp@dual.UUCP and uucp@uclachem.UUCP. Most of these articles have bounced five, six, seven or more times. These articles total over 550K. This has been going on for twelve days -- the first bounced article is dated September 3. This is an incredible waste of that much vaunted net bandwidth, and readers of comp.mail.elm can't get a word in edgewise. So, can we see some action from the administrators of dual and uclachem? If not, maybe some more drastic action is warranted. News neighbors pulling the plug, perhaps? It is the responsibility of each individual system administrator to see that the general activity of the net is not grossly interrupted by broken news software or sheer negligence. Well, the general activity of part of the net is being grossly interrupted here -- many people are affected by this brain-damaged behavior. It is virtually impossible to wade through all the articles in that newsgroup. And just how much money does it cost to transmit 550K of thoroughly unnecessary articles? COMPLETELY unecessary; this endless repetition of fourteen articles is pointless and wasteful. A switch in status from moderated to unmoderated should not entail this. I would hope that the management of the net is reasonably competent, but it seems that in this instance the tiny minority can get things royally futzed up for the rest of us. I am no news expert; I can't give a diagnosis of the exact cause of this problem, but it seems likely to me, based on my knowledge of the news software, that the entire cause of this is that the admins of these two machines have simply not updated their active files. I may, of course, be wrong; see my .signature, below. Personally, I've had enough. Two weeks of sitting here hoping someone would get it together have done no good; so I air this grievance publicly. I am sure many readers agree with me. Note that this article is cross-posted to comp.mail.elm as well as news.admin. If this one gets bounced, people, we'll be getting it in news.admin. Maybe, possibility, that will add a bit of motivation to get it taken care of. Which it would be VERY nice to see happen so we can resume life as normal. -- Bill Wisner ..ihnp4!killer!billw "An it harms none, do what thou will." Everything in this message may be wrong.