jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) (07/10/85)
It has been suggested that the news be modified to prevent posting an
article to more than one news group if one of the groups is net.flame.
A little grepping in my history file showed that over half of the
net.flame articles there were cross posted to other groups. This is
interisting as sites that plan to drop net.flame are going to get
half of it anyway. Anyone wanting to get their article thru such sites
can just include a "carrier" newsgroup.
Implementing any restriction at the time of posting will be ineffectual
as many sites will not make the changes. I would suggest that the
check be made at the time of forwarding as is done with aliases. Any
articles that are received posted to net.flame and any other group can
be changed to just net.flame. This way all downstream sites benefit.
Alternativly rnews could forward the newsgroups unchanged but only post
the article in net.flame on that machine. This way each site could
decide it's policy independent of the others.
The real question is whether this is a good idea. On the surface it
sounds good to me. As I understand it the whole purpose of net.flame
was to give people a place to rant and rave without messing up other
groups. I suspect that some people are using flame as a keyword to
indicate content while still posting to the original group.
So far I have not heard anyone object to the idea of restricting cross
postings from net.flame. Does anyone feel that cross postings from
net.flame SHOULD be allowed? Mail to me and I will summarize.
Jerry Aguirre @ Olivetti ATC
{hplabs|fortune|idi|ihnp4|tolerant|allegra|tymix}!oliveb!jerry