warren (12/31/82)
The duplicates are coming out of a notesfile system. We have already had several failures of this nature, where a notesfile to netnews gateway screws up and constantly re-posts articles. I expect that everybodies spool directories will be full of them by next Monday, but I can suggest some short and long term fixes: 1) If anyone in sytek or tektronix is still alive, well, and reading news, maybe they could shut down their link to zhentel until someone cleans up their act! All of our duplicates come through one of these two sites. 2) To prevent this kind of nonsense in the future, it would be nice if there were some command that could be sent to a news site that would force it to shut up. It would be quite simple to do, since all you would have to do is read /dev/null instead of the sys file, which would permit news reception and local posting, but keep anything from going out over the network. Obviously mis-use of this facility would be a serious crime, punishable by forcing the perpretrator(s) to copy the entire accumulated archives of news on the board 42 times. 3) On the other hand, maybe we should just gateway all news from zinfandel into net.wines, where we can all unsubscribe to it. (Sorry, it's been a long day) Warren Montgomery (ihnss!warren)
bcw (01/04/83)
From: Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University Re: The Zinfandel Syndrome (sounds like some cheap SF movie!) This sounds like a good opportunity to suggest something which occurred to me some time ago: it would help eliminate a lot of trash if I could, in addition to blacklisting certain newsgroups I don't want to read, if I could blacklist certain individuals/sites whose submissions I don't want to read. I know this sounds like guilt-by-association, but one has to defend oneself somehow, and if there is no other appropriate mechanism ... well, I may be forced to simply desubscribe to essentially ALL the newsgroups since the proportion of useful information has dropped to just about 0. Please direct any flames to /dev/null, as that is where any hate mail on this subject will be dropped anyway ... Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University