kristoff@GENBANK.BIO.NET (Dave Kristofferson) (04/27/91)
I have tracked down the problem to an address at Ohio State which is subscribed through IRLEARN in Ireland instead of following our rules and subscribing through GenBank in the Americas. Because of this I can not take direct action myself. All parties have been notified and I hope to have the problem resolved no later than Monday AM (in the event that no one logs in over the weekend). This illustrates **yet again** (sigh) why all of you should dump e-mail as a news source as soon as possible and get your systems manager to install a USENET news system. Mail will continue to be vulnerable to loops if people do not know how to configure their systems correctly. I can send information about this to whoever is interested. Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson GenBank Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net
toms@fcs260c2.ncifcrf.gov (Tom Schneider) (04/30/91)
In article <CMM.0.88.672769591.kristoff@genbank.bio.net> kristoff@GENBANK.BIO.NET (Dave Kristofferson) writes: >This illustrates **yet >again** (sigh) why all of you should dump e-mail as a news source as >soon as possible and get your systems manager to install a USENET news >system. Mail will continue to be vulnerable to loops if people do not >know how to configure their systems correctly. I can send information >about this to whoever is interested. > Dave Kristofferson > GenBank Manager > kristoff@genbank.bio.net These bionet groups are the only news groups that regularly have these problems. If there is no technical reason that prevents people from switching to a pure usenet system, then how about making a reasonable deadline for the switch? After a certain date news would no longer be sent by mail, perhaps with the exception of a few 'hardship' cases. Because of these problems, we all have to read a lot of junk all the time and it's wasting people's time, especially yours Dave! If you can't set a deadline because of a bionet charter then change the charter. If you set a deadline, everybody will suddenly be interested... :-). Tom Schneider National Cancer Institute Laboratory of Mathematical Biology Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201 toms@ncifcrf.gov
Cherry@Frodo.MGH.Harvard.EDU (J. Michael Cherry) (05/02/91)
In article <2138@fcs280s.ncifcrf.gov> toms@fcs260c2.ncifcrf.gov (Tom Schneider) writes: > These bionet groups are the only news groups that regularly have these > problems. If there is no technical reason that prevents people from > switching to a pure usenet system The INFO-VMS list has also had lots of problems with duplicates. More importantly I think the problems generally seem to be associated with LISTSERVs. There are many Usenet/Mailing list pairs that do not have these problems. Most of these pairs that seem to work use an Internet mailing list and not a BITNET LISTSERV. The problem is not simply mailing lists. As someone who ran a mailing list of 300 subscribers for a year and a half I know they can work without problems. Thus I wish to stop any move to eliminate mailing lists from BioSci. I know many people that would not take the time to use Usenet and would thus not be a part of BioSci. I should point out that I personally use Usenet and have been reading newsgroups via Unix, VMS or Macintosh newsreaders for the past ten years. I agree Usenet is the best method and that everyone should learn to use a newsreader but teaching old dogs new tricks can be very frustrating. Usenet swept computer science departments many years ago, it may take several more years before biology departments convert - and I don't think they should be forced. Mike Cherry cherry@frodo.mgh.harvard.edu Department of Molecular Biology Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
kristoff@genbank.bio.net (David Kristofferson) (05/02/91)
Mike, I am in general agreement with your position about not forcing the move, but I do want to strongly encourage people to take action. I'd also like to elaborate on your point about USENET having already swept computer science departments. This illustrates that many biologists probably have a USENET source somewhere not too far away on campus if they would just check with their computer science departments. They might also find that they can get help feeding the newsgroups to their departmental computer. Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson GenBank Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net