matt@oddjob.UChicago.UUCP (Matt Crawford) (06/15/84)
Well, quite a variety of results were reported from my little experiment. Let me first apologize to those who were irritated or inconvenienced. I will give below the reasons why I went ahead and tried. Review of the problem: How can a person post to a localized group (such as nj.wanted) when they do not belong to the area covered by that group? Reasons for wishing to do so would include trying to find temporary housing for a visit or other information specific to the distant region. There were several postings a couple months ago about this and the only workable (albeit unwieldy) proposal made was to create a set of mail addresses which would be fed into such newsgroups. Attempted solution: On the assumption that net.test was propagated to every site, but was read by very few people, I posted to "net.test,ba.wanted". The test article contained a header line "References: None." to avoid having inews complain about the (locally) invalid newsgroup. I also reasoned as follows: 1. Few sites should have AUTONEWNG set. This is the option that automatically creates newsgroups when articles arrive. I posted a bug relating to AUTONEWNG a while ago and received replies saying that AUTONEWNG was a bad thing anyway and that new sites were better off just copying their neighbor's sys files. 2. Those with AUTONEWNG should be mostly new sites. If they are in the bay area (ba), ba.wanted would be created if it did not exist. I have seen news articles go by with newsgroups "net.wanted,ba.wanted", and my system won't let me post an article which contains ANY illegal groups*, so I figured that ba.wanted must already exist. As it turned out, some ba sites had ba.wanted and some didn't. New sites with AUTONEWNG but not in the ba would be a danger. I chose to hope that new sites also had recent software, specifically the subdirectory system of newsgroup organization. In this case the mkdir() of NEWSDIR/ba/wanted/ would fail because NEWSDIR/ba/ would not exist. Hence no problem, as long as all the assumptions hold up. I think I was wrong about this, though. All the parent directories get created when necessary. Oh well. (* The article may have SOME illegal groups as long as it has some legal groups and a non-empty "References:" line.) Drawbacks of the attempted solution: Aside from the problems alluded to above, and those specifically mentioned below, the most obvious drawback is that the article is still transmitted to the entire net. The only accomplishment is that a very large number of people are spared the bother of reading it. On the plus side is the fact that such articles would have probably gone to "net.wanted" anyway, so there is a net advantage, as it were. Results: Several ba sites reported receiving the article in "ba.wanted". Some said such a group did not previously exist. Somewhere along the route to sdcsvax in San Diego the ",ba.wanted" was stripped. (Chuq, you were asking about this.) The newsgroup was created at foxvax1 in Massachusetts. (Steve Schwarm, sorry 'bout that.) Responses: From: ihnp4!amd70!phil sorry charlie, there is no ba.wanted that I know of. you also polluted net.test. From: ihnp4!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!brian (Brian Kantor) Well, the article arrived here with net.test as the only newsgroup - evidently somewhere along the way the other newsgroups got stripped. From: ihnp4!dual!ptsfa!dsp We received it in ba.wanted. From: ihnp4!decwrl!turtlevax!ken (Ken Turkowski) We didn't have a ba.wanted newsgroup before, but now we've got one. We may treat the creation of this newsgroup as illegal, and remove it. Other sites may not allow the creation of a new newsgroup automatically, and hence may not even get your message. Because of such low traffic in ba.* newsgroups, we've been mainly just using ba.general. Please do not use tricks like the one you used, unless you know something about the local newsgroup structure. In other words, you cannot assume that newsgroups with a ba prefix exists for each net.* newsgroup. From: ihnp4!sdcsvax!allyn Somewhere along this path the Newsgroups line got rewritten excluding the ,ba.wanted part. dcdwest!ittvax!decvax!decwrl!allegra!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!... From: <ihnp4!hplabs!hplabsc!faunt> It got here, to hplabs, and showed up in (created, actually) ba.wanted. This is the path by which it arrived. hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!vax135!allegra!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!... From: ihnp4!allegra!wjh12!foxvax1!scs I got it here in ba.wanted. Conclusions: There is no added cost to the net compared to posting in "net.wanted", AS LONG AS: 1. The proper distant group is known. 2. Nobody is using AUTONEWNG. (Or the feature is changed to prevent automatic creation of top-level groups. Arggh. I wanted a solution that used no software changes.) Comments??? ___________________________________________________________ Matt University ARPA: crawford@anl-mcs.arpa Crawford of Chicago UUCP: ihnp4!oddjob!matt