jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) (02/15/86)
Ignoring the, as yet, undocumented charges of censoring, the two main
criticisms of moderated groups are the delays introduced in going thru a
moderator and the difficulty in mailing to the moderator.
Given the current state of uucp and internet mail, I think the mail
problem is the more serious one. My last attempt to update the my news
moderators file led me to believe that the problem is far from solved.
Consider that each new moderated group, change of moderators, or change
of a moderator's home system requires the manual editing of a file on
thousands of systems. Even with perfect mail the situation is
unworkable.
All this led me to wonder if their might not be a simpler way. The
basic problem is that posting to an moderated group uses a different
transmission mechanism than normal postings. As news and mail do not
follow the same paths it is possible to have one and be completely cut
off from the other.
All this could be simplified if the news software were responsible for
transmitting the article to the poster. What I would suggest is that,
for each moderated group, a companion "to" group be created. Thus a
posting to "mod.sources" would be automatically redirected into
"to.mod.sources". Each site would then have a special entry in its
"sys" file that said where to send "to.mod" articles.
For the average site this would be a single entry sending "to.mod.all"
back to its main feed. Immediately thousands of usenet sites have
permanently solved their path to moderators problem. Each "feed" site
would forward the "to.mod" articles to another site in the direction of
the moderator. The feed site would NOT send those articles to other
"downstream" sites.
At some point a "backbone" or other major site would special case the
various "to.mod.whatever" news groups and split them off in various
directions toward the moderator's home system. Finally, the moderator
would subscribe to "to.mod.hisgroup", evaluate each article, and create
a posting for the moderated group.
This scheme has the following advantages:
1 - Reduction of support required by sites. The average site
can feed "to.mod" to its' main feed and trash the
"moderators" file. A relatively few major sites can
optimize the paths to moderators.
2 - Elimination of unpostable paths. If a site can post normal
articles then it can post to a moderator.
3 - Redundant paths to the moderator are possible. Because each
posting is a normal news article with an article ID, the
article can be routed thru several alternate paths with the
slower paths being automatically rejected.
The only problem I can see would be a loop of "to.mod" forwarding. The
news software could be modified to check for such a "to.mod" posting
coming from the site(s) it was supposed to be sent to and send mail to
the local news administrator telling him a loop exists.
The changes to the software seem simple and would solve a lot of
problems. Diehards and posters who know faster paths could continue to
mail their postings.
Comments?
Jerry Aguirre @ Olivetti ATC
{hplabs|fortune|idi|ihnp4|tolerant|allegra|glacier|olhqma}!oliveb!jerry