wapd@houxj.UUCP (Bill Dietrich) (11/21/84)
I have a suggestion that might reduce the amount of posting to inappropriate newsgroups. The suggestion is that the posting software (postnews, here) ask for the newsgroups to post the article to, print a one-line description of the group's purpose, and then ask for confirmation. I hope that this would help to prevent naive users from posting in inappropriate groups. If the burden of confirmation is too tiresome for expert users, maybe it could be disabled by having the environment variable NEWSEXPERT set (or some such thing). The one-line descriptions could be maintained in one file on each system, and updated via control messages or some similar mechanism. This file would also be real useful for naive users who don't know what groups they want to subscribe to. Bill Dietrich houxj!wapd