[news.misc] At last, a way to reduce news traffic :-)

jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) (11/11/86)

Most of you are probably aware that there was an premature posting of
newgroup messages for all the proposed newsgroup renamings.  This caused
many (if not most) sites to exceed the maximum allowed number of
newsgroups in their active files.  Some sites are still recovering from
this problem.

It is interesting to note that the volume of news articles for last week
was less than half what it was for the previous week.

	Oct 27 11:48 to Nov 1 23:58	6,755 articles
	Nov 1 23:59 to Nov 10 15:15	3,102 articles

The reduction in volumn gives you some idea of the number of sites that
were blown off the air.

I know it took me a couple of hours to clean up old newsgroups,
recompile news with larger tables, and reprocess the failing batches.
(My news daemon renames and saves batches when rnews exits with an error
status.)  Multiply that times the number of sites on the net and you
probably get many thousands of manhours spent cleaning up.

Amazing to think how vulnerable the net is to the actions of one
individual.

					Jerry Aguirre
					Olivetti ATC