control@almsa-1 (William Martin) (07/01/85)
With regard to the possibility of sites limiting newsgroups: One thing that will be necessary before this becomes very widespread will be a revision of the existing documentation on setting up the news system at a new site. Right now, it all assumes that a new site will want all the newsgroups. There might be some mention of methods of eliminating and restricting groups, but it certainly is not prominent nor easy to find. What is needed is a paragraph near the start with the heading something like "DO YOU WANT A FULL OR A LIMITED NEWS SYSTEM?" and then clear and explicit instructions on what to do, what variables to set, what files to edit, etc., for limiting your site's news system to a subset of the available groups. (For those that want a full and unlimited system, the instructions would point the reader to go on to the next section, where the existing documentation would continue as it is now.) So this would only involve another paragraph or two added to the documentation. Could whoever is currently maintaining the documentation do this, and maybe send out the added section on net.news so all of us can see it? Will
sjl@amdahl.UUCP (Steve Langdon) (07/05/85)
In his article Will suggested that the news documentation should be updated to
include information for sites that wanted to support a subset of news groups.
This seems to be a sensible suggestion, but it reminded me of a related
problem.
Use of groups is intended to provide a framework so that information and
discussions on a particular topic are kept together. If a large number of
sites decide to support a subset of newsgroups then the system will be
subverted. I already see a number of items that start with words like,
"I know this is the wrong group, but we do not get net.whatever".
I know that there are reasons, such as limited disk capacity, that may restrict
a site's ability to support all of the groups. Has anyone out there got any
bright ideas about how to support a subset of newsgroups without making life
more difficult for those sites that support all of the groups.
--
Stephen J. Langdon ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun,nsc}!amdahl!sjl
[ The article above is not an official statement from any organization
in the known universe. ]gordon@sneaky (07/05/85)
Yes, some documentation on how to limit newsgroups would definitely help the news distribution. Also, I keep hearing encouragements that if I don't like a particular group at my site, I should just pass it on to other sites but not keep the articles locally. This sounds like a reasonable idea, if I have the uucp spool space, (my connections are local calls) but how does one accomplish it? Under 2.10.2, a group I exclude from my system's sys line has all it's articles put in junk. This is just as bad as keeping the group. My reason for excluding groups is disk space, not net fascism, and if none of the users want the group, they would much rather have some more free disk space. Isn't there some way to allow an article to come in, and have no trace of it remain in my file system after the uucp queues have cleared? (except log and maybe history?) Running expire or just a mass clearing of "junk" from cron every half hour isn't acceptable. Gordon Burditt ...!convex!ctvax!trsvax!sneaky!gordon ...!microsoft!trsvax!sneaky!gordon ...!ihnp4!sys1!sneaky!gordon