mbr@aoa.UUCP (Mark Rosenthal) (10/03/85)
In article <126@sdencore.UUCP>, which was posted to both net.news and net.news.notes mark@sdencore.UUCP (Mark DiVecchio) writes: > > One simple step, which has to have been suggested before, is prohibit > posting the same message to multiple newsgroups. I've seen this suggested before, but I've never understood how people think it is going to help the situation. It would simply encourage posters who want to get around the restriction to post via multiple invocations of postnews/Pnews, rather than a single invocation. Then we all get to read the garbage twice! There are already enough duplicate articles that readnews/vnews/rn can't screen out because the sender posted them with multiple invocations of postnews/Pnews. I usually attribute this to the poster's inexperience, and send them mail explaining why it is preferable to post to multiple groups in a single invocation. However the malicious poster will always be able to do this in order to force an article to appear in multiple newsgroups. Software to screen out such malicious postings would be virtually impossible to write. The simplest software solution to screen out multiple-invocation postings would be to compare every article to every other article. Doing this at the sending site requires all other sites to upgrade their software in order for the scheme to work. Experience clearly demonstrates that this is not going to happen. If you do the compare at the receiving site, you have a task which will chew up an enormous number of CPU cycles. You might reduce this by comparing only articles from the same sender. You do store articles in a data-base indexed by sender, don't you? :-) This works assuming the poster has only one login id. But the real problem is that of writing an article comparison routine which could filter out trivially changed articles. A slight change in wording in a single sentence would cause the comparison to fail. Even slight changes in wording in a single sentence might cause the comparison to fail. The slightest change in the wording of even a single sentence could cause the comparison to fail. I don't think we have AI techniques advanced enough to be able to handle the problem. Certainly not in a form that could be installed on most machines on the net! Since it is unfeasable to produce a technical solution to the problem of multiple-invocation postings, we must depend on the courtesy of the poster. Anything which presents such an obvious barrier to the poster's wishes is likely to lower the poster's courtesy level. Like, from -5 to -10 on a scale from +1 to +10. :-) / 2 -- Mark of the Valley of Roses ...!{decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!aoa!mbr
pwd@pid.UUCP (Philip W. Dalrymple) (10/05/85)
In article <312@aoa.UUCP> mbr@aoa.UUCP (Mark Rosenthal) writes: >In article <126@sdencore.UUCP>, which was posted to both net.news and >net.news.notes mark@sdencore.UUCP (Mark DiVecchio) writes: >> >> One simple step, which has to have been suggested before, is prohibit >> posting the same message to multiple newsgroups. > >I've seen this suggested before, but I've never understood how people think >it is going to help the situation. It would simply encourage posters who I think that this comes from the notes sites which have a real problem with multiple newsgroups. Would it be posible for the people who maintain the notes system to allow multiple newsgroups is there system. Note: pid runs a news system and I have never seen Notes so I do not know what I am talking about. -- Philip Dalrymple akgua!pid!pwd 404/429-8266 (voice)
mbr@aoa.UUCP (Mark Rosenthal) (10/09/85)
In article <196@pid.UUCP> pwd@pid.UUCP (Philip W. Dalrymple) responds to my earlier article: > >I think that this comes from the notes sites which have a real problem with >multiple newsgroups. Would it be posible for the people who maintain the >notes system to allow multiple newsgroups is there system. I think you've missed my point. Even if it is possible for the poster to identify an article posted to several groups as the same article, it is not possible to force the poster to do so. A malicious poster can always post the same article to as many newsgroups as s/he wants, or even multiple times to the same newsgroup, and we all are forced to read (or make some disposition of it) as many times as it was posted. A good example of such antisocial behavior are the recent articles by tektronix!tekig3!tekadg!davidl entitled "Unix, Unixpeople, Usenix - from a non-compunerd's point of view...". These were all identical, and posted to several different newsgroups, instead of being posted to net.flame where it belonged. There can be no reason for doing this other than to annoy people on the net. It happens. Proposing to prevent a poster from posting a single article to multiple newsgroups, as did the original article to which I was responding, will just make it happen that much more often. -- Mark of the Valley of Roses ...!{decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!aoa!mbr
on@hpda.UUCP (Owen Rowley) (10/24/85)
Here at H.P. we mostly use notes, which uses input from news for net.*
if you use postnews and specify more than one newsgoup at a time.
our version of notes will only post it in the first newsgroup given
and ignore any others.. this means that a major proportion of HP
notes users are not seeing a lot of articles..
I first noticed this because I was using both notes and rn ..
It was obvious that I was getting articles in net groups with rn
that I was not seeing with notes.. Investigation showed that most of the
articles that were missing from notes were posted to multiple groups.
unfortunatly rn and news is not available to the majority of HP machines
or users. I am sure that there are other nodes were the situation is similar.
So if you really want to be sure that everyone sees your article posting
to multiple groups is not the way to go..
LUX.. on
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