z (12/06/82)
This morning I read my news and found that fa.space, fa.works, fa.info-micro, and fa.railroad had all been deleted. We get these newsgroups directly from the Arpanet mailing lists (like Berkeley), and many of our users prefer to read them in digested form instead of the equivalent "net." groups. I have reinstated these newsgroups on our system; I ask that they not be deleted again. In the mean time, all of our users have lost their unread messages from these groups. (We don't forward these groups to most of the net, so we're not clogging up the net with them.) This whole business of newsgroup deletion has gotten completely out of hand. There should be no way that a person at another site can delete newsgroups at my site which I have personally created. As it is, just about any random person can delete arbitrary newsgroups, and this has led to complete chaos. This morning when I logged in, I found that 88 messages had accumulated for me over the weekend. Of these, 74 were newsgroup removal messages. This is plain silly. People have argued that it's good to remove unnecessary newsgroups for efficiency reasons. Any efficiency gained by this has long been eclipsed by the confusion, loss of news, and flood of control messages which are a result of the removal attempts. I would like to propose the following: 1. An immediate moratorium on newsgroup removal by everyone except news administrators for their own particular site. 2. A change to the news software so that only the creator of a newsgroup may issue netwide group removal messages. News administrators could issue removal messages for their own site. 3. Implementation of newsgroup expiration in the news software. Newsgroups which hadn't been used for a certain period of time would automatically be deleted. This would automatically take care of spurious newsgroups which had been created when they shouldn't have been. I think that without serious steps such as these, the situation will continue to degenerate rapidly. Steve Zimmerman decvax!cca!z z@cca
trb (12/06/82)
I am in favor of the newsgroup cleanup that alice!sjb (Adam Buchsbaum) has been doing. If Steve Zimmermann channels ARPANET's RAILROAD newsgroup into his machine (only) he should call it fa_railroad, not fa.railroad. Group names with embedded dots are implicitly thought of as being forwarded from site to site, fa.groups are thought of as net.groups from the ARPANET and should likewise be adminstrated on a multi-site basis. I have local newsgroups on my machine; I don't call them net.anything or fa.anything and I don't complain to the world about intefering with them, because the world never touches them. USENET still has many flaws, and people like Adam are trying to work within the contraints of these flaws. I hear people complaining about Adam's dictatorial stance, but the way I see it, the network doesn't do its own housekeeping, and careful garbage collection measures seem useful until someone comes up with a better way. I don't see anyone coming up with suggestions which I would like better than the actions which Adam has already taken. I fear that the network will continue to suffer at the hands of (imperialist running dog) adminsitrators who run ancient netnews software which allows naive users to create bogus newsgroups and do other such nasties. See you at the netnews bof, Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
ccc (12/06/82)
I agree with Steve Zimmerman. One could almost make a new hit science
fiction film: Newsgroup Wars. In addition to Steve's comments, I will
be so bold as to make some of my own, to wit:
1) I would imagine that some newsgroups could be handled
effectively by mailing lists. I realize that this puts some
strain on the net, but surely it is less than sending the
article to everyone. Candidates for this approach would be
those newsgroups with very small participation and
readership.
2) Digestification of medium-sized groups. As has been
mentioned before, this would require someone to volunteer
as moderator, which could get to be time-consuming. I
wonder if automatic moderation is possible (preferably at a
"large" site such as decvax or ucbvax)...
Groups that do not involve much dialogue or are primarily
informational (such as net.unix-wizards) would be good
candidates for this. Also this could reduce duplication of
responses.
I realize that several of these ideas have shown up on the net before,
and thus I am breaking my own suggestions. Such is life...
Clayton Elwell
{usenet}!decvax!cwruecmp!cccsjb@sri-unix (12/06/82)
fa.space, fa.railroad, fa.works, and fa.info-micro were deleted because they are all gatewayed to net.all groups. I didn't know that some sites still get them. Why didn't you say something weeks ago when I proposed removing them? Why has everyone waited until NOW to complain instead of doing it weeks ago when the chance was first available? Your suggestion of newsgroup expiration is just what this is: An attempt to get rid of dead groups.
z (12/07/82)
Actually, our "fa." newsgroups are distributed to about a half dozen machines downstream from us, and are not purely local. Originally, we got our "fa." newsgroups from Berkeley until they ignominiously cut off our news last March; I then subscribed to the mailing lists directly to replace the lost news. Once we got reconnected to the rest of Usenet, I kept our versions of the "fa." groups because it assured more timely receipt of news by our little corner of the net, as well as reducing the load and phone bills of poor decvax. As Lauren Weinstein mentioned in another message (I'm afraid I've forgotten to which newsgroup), there are plenty of sites out there whose users prefer the digestified "fa." groups to the undigestified "net." groups. Yet these users, especially the ones who didn't happen to read the article announcing the impending deletions, were given no choice in the matter. It is one thing to delete newsgroups which haven't been used in many months, and it is quite another to delete newsgroups which are currently in use by large numbers of people. The fact that there was not an immediate wave of protest to the original proposal does not imply that everyone, or even a majority, agrees with it. Again, I fail to see the urgent need for deleting actively used newsgroups. Steve Zimmerman
bstempleton (12/08/82)
I think Adam went too far myself. If your site has limited resources and can't keep old groups around, then remove them. Sites with more resources should not be told what to do with them. Adam asked if anybody minded the deletion of the newsgroups and since nobody complained, he went ahead. What he should have thought was that if you are going to act on another site you should have explicit permission from that site. Zimmerman is a case in point, he went away for a while and never got to tell Adam not to remove the groups or have a chance to save them. And no, Andy, I don't see any reason why a person shouldn't be able to call the groups on his own machine whatever he damn well pleases.
sjb (12/08/82)
Well, because of the fact that no one BOTHERED to say that sites still got some of the fa.all groups that others do not, I was under the impression that nobody did. That's what apathy's gonna do, gang. If you don't respond, it's your own fault. The need is not urgent, but why wait until the last minute. Is there an urgent need for the net at all? No, we could all live without it, but we enjoy it, so we use it. Just because the need isn't URGENT doesn't mean we can't look at it!
mark (12/09/82)
I'm hearing people who want individual articles, and people who want digests. I'd like to ask for a bit of clarification from the digest wanters. There are two good properties of digests (in addition to several bad properties such as load, requiring a moderator, and delay in getting news to people), which are (1) you have a moderator, who weeds out duplications and chaff, sorts things into a convenient order, etc., and (2) several articles are packaged into one digest. I understand the advantages of (1), but could someone explain the advantages of (2)? I can picture an environment where some newsgroups have moderators (say net.general and maybe net.jokes) but nothing is digestified. The readnews software would sort things into discussion order (like notesfiles does) and news articles would be batched in such a way as to make uucp perform decently. People would still have the option of "readnews -p | lpr" to get newspapers. Is there some other advantage to digestification? Mark
thomas (12/09/82)
I think there's an option in the netnews software to send control messages such as "remove this newsgroup" to the admin, rather than actually acting on them. If everybody had this turned on, then each site could decide for itself whether it wanted to actually delete the group in question. =Spencer
essick (12/09/82)
#R:cca:-380100:uiucdcs:10900011:000:1095 uiucdcs!essick Dec 9 11:28:00 1982 For what it's worth: I can understand why people might be bitter about having lost a newsgroup, especially if they hadn't read it yet. I'd be pissed if suddenly a bunch of information that I wanted disappeared. But I think that Adam (alice!sjb) is doing a good thing cleaning up the newsgroups. Here are few comments that I have on the issue: There is a define MANUALLY (commented out in the release, but it tells you its purpose) which says to NOT remove a newsgroup when the control message comes in, but to inform the news administrator instead. Maybe everyone should run to their source and recompile with that line uncommented.... Maybe the process of removing groups should be changed. It might be nice if instead of just zapping the data & directories away it merely refused to allow local writes into that newsgroup. This would let the messages still floating around to come in, and the information in the newsgroup wouldn't be lost. Cleaning out the directory and the ``.newsgroup'' file could wait for another time. -- Ray Essick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
mclure@sri-unix (12/09/82)
#R:cca:-380100:sri-unix:8200006:000:1364 sri-unix!mclure Dec 9 03:28:00 1982 The reason many of the large Arpanet mailing lists went to digest format a few years ago is: it was less of a load on the MIT mailers to deliver one message per person per day rather than N msgs per person per day. I do not see how this can apply to Usenet except in a very limited fashion. Yes, digests are less of a load in all cases, but Usenet already transmits so many individual messages and the fact that it is a distributed form of transmission with a small fanout factor (as opposed to the large fanout for sites on the Arpanet) indicates that the difference is minimal on a per-system basis. Thus, we are left with the advantages and disadvantages of digests vs. individual messages. The former allows pruning out of unwanted fluff. But note that one list, sf-lovers, does that and yet now maintains the individual message gateway as well. The moderator remails individual messages of interest back to the gateway machine sri-unix, so the fluff is eliminated and the individual message gateway maintains this advantage of digests. To me, this seems the ideal form for an Arpanet/Usenet gateway. Programs such as notesfile and readnews make it much easier to skip unwanted material which would ordinarily have to be scanned in a digest. It seems to me that digests are a holdover from the Arpanet and the large fanout of that network. Stuart
z (12/10/82)
The problem with setting the MANUALLY flag in defs.h to prevent automatic deletion of newsgroups is that all the spurious newsgroups which are frequently created, such as net.joke, net.periph, etc., then need to be deleted by hand. This turns out to be at least as much work as the original problem. Meanwhile, why in the world am I still receiving several messages a day to delete net.trivia? I can assure whoever is interested that that newsgroup is quite dead. Steve Zimmerman
msm (12/14/82)
From menlo70!hao!seismo!harpo!npoiv!alice!sjb Mon Dec 6 15:59:35 1982
Subject: Re: Newsgroup Deletion
Newsgroups: net.news
fa.space, fa.railroad, fa.works, and fa.info-micro were deleted because
they are all gatewayed to net.all groups. I didn't know that some
sites still get them. Why didn't you say something weeks ago when
I proposed removing them? Why has everyone waited until NOW to complain
instead of doing it weeks ago when the chance was first available?
Your suggestion of newsgroup expiration is just what this is: An
attempt to get rid of dead groups.
Perhaps the reason for the outcry now instead of weeks ago, is that no one
got the original proposal for deleting the newsgroups! No such messages
arrived at this site (I even grep'ed all the news files looking for
such a message -- there was none (back to Late October)).
I do know that not all electronic mail and news arrives where it is supposed
to go on this network. It could be that alice!sjb's message was lost quite
early in its life.
Is there anything that can be done to improve the reliability of this network?
One method (for mail at least) is to allow "certified" mail, where the
destination host will send an acknowlegement message back to the sender,
thereby letting him know if the mail was delivered. If either the orignal
message or the acknowlegement is lost, then the sender can re-send the
message. This can be either a manual or (preferably) an automatic
process. The time out period to cause re-transmission must be sufficiently
long enough to allow both the message and its acknowlegement
to percolate through the network (5 days or so?). The decision to send
acknowlegements should be up the sender (ie; the message would have
"CERTIFIED" in the header block).
A further enhancement would be "registered" mail, which would send an
additional acknowlegement message when the user READS the mail.
This of course requires modifying the mail reading program (probably
different on each host).
Any comments?
Michael S. Maiten
Silicon Gulch, California
<...!{ucbvax!menlo70,decvax}!sytek!msm>rick (12/17/82)
I strongly suspect that there is a bug in (at lease some levels of) the netnews software. The newsgroup deletetion control commands for net.trivia (and several others) have been circulating around the net and for a very long time. This should *not* happen. They should eventually be seen by every site on the net once and then dissapear. Is the problem the fact that there is no history kept of their arival, so there is no way to know if this is a new request? Does anybody who knows more about the netnews software than I have a suggestion. If there *is* a bug, what can we do about it? (It would seem that an overwhelming majority of all the sites on the net would have to install the fix for it to have any effect! -- and we all know how hard it is to get people to accept new software.) Reply to the net, please Rick Thomas
rjk (12/19/82)
I too noticed that the net.msg.ctl messages echo around. I sent a couple out 2 days ago. I got the mail from news saying what I did, then a few hours later, some of my neighbor machines sent me the *same* message back, as though I had once again issued the rmgrp ctl message. Poor Adam; this feature makes it appear as though he types those messages all day! Randy King