evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) (11/14/89)
The whole bruhaha over the creation of sci.aquaria brought this to a
head, but it's been on my mind for a number of months:
I run a public access Usenet system, one which hopes to attract people
who are intelligent but not necessarily Unix literate. I want to
make life easier for subscribers, which means I want to make it as easy
as possible for them to find the appropriate forum for whatever they
want to discuss.
In this respect, to me, the Usenet naming hierarchy sucks. Big time.
I honestly don't think it takes a rocket scientist to come up
with something better. I could. Any of you could. And I want to.
Compounding the problem is now that this site gets news from both Usenet
and CanConfMail/SmartNet, there are conflicting newsgroup names for the
same subject from different sources (for instance, ccm.ibm.pc and
comp.sys.ibm.pc)
And maybe I'm being presumptuous, but I don't have any hesitation about
where non-controversial groups like postscript-maps should go. I trust
my instinct in these matters more than I trust anything in news.groups...
I want to develop my own newsgroup 'namespace' for use on my system.
If other sites are interested in it, God Bless, and I'll certainly
take constructive criticism and improve it. I'm even willing, (in fact,
I'd prefer,) to work on a small committee to constructively bang our
heads together to come up with an alternative to what exists.
But I refuse to subject to the bitching, flaming and massive gnashing of
teeth that goes on in news.*. I don't want to be dictated to by either
the mindless votes of those who rammed through sci.aquaria or the net.gods
who "in their wisdom" vetoed soc.sex. Both extremes have failed.
I always hear that "votes are just guidelines - every sysadmin has his
own freedom to do what he pleases." I suspect the technology is there to
let me do this without affecting my neighbours, but I'm not sure how.
Does the Usenet software currently in use allow me to re-arrange the
hierarchies *only for the purposes of reading on this site*, without
scrambling it all up for my feeds (both upstream and downstream).
As a very basic example, say my upstream feed sends me sci.aquaria. I,
not giving a damn about European distribution fights, want to have this
read on my site as rec.aquaria, but I want to pass it to my downstream
feeds in its original name.
Is this possible to implement without redoing major pieces of either the
routing or reading software?
ALSO:
Anyone like to help me work on a better hierarchy scheme, far away from
the noise of mainstream Usenet? A scheme that will acommodate large
numbers of people and multiple sources of info on any given subject?
Like a challenge? :-)
--
Men. They can put one on the moon. | Evan Leibovitch, Telly Computing,
Why can't they put 'em all there? | located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
- CBC's "Street Legal" | evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evanhenry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (11/16/89)
In article <1989Nov14.041714.4650@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes: >Does the Usenet software currently in use allow me to re-arrange the >hierarchies *only for the purposes of reading on this site*, without >scrambling it all up for my feeds (both upstream and downstream). No, you'd have to bash on the news readers a fair bit, I would think. If you aren't concerned about outbound news, you can use C News's "=" feature to remap groups locally, but that mapping is one-way and will be visible to anyone you feed. Actually, if you just want to *experiment*, you could be perverse and run two C Newses on the same machine. #1 would be set up in the orthodox way and would handle incoming and outgoing feeds; it would feed stuff to #2 as if it were a separate machine. #2 would be set up as a leaf node for the news readers, and would remap newsgroups with wild abandon. I don't think I'd recommend this for long-term operation, as I'd suspect it would be a trifle inefficient, but it should work. -- A bit of tolerance is worth a | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology megabyte of flaming. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (11/16/89)
In article <1989Nov15.172022.511@utzoo.uucp> I wrote: >If you aren't concerned about outbound news, you can use C News's "=" >feature to remap groups locally, but that mapping is one-way and will >be visible to anyone you feed. Actually, Geoff points out that the on-disk articles are unaltered ("=" affects where they are put but not their content) and could be sent to other sites without making the mapping visible to them. I'd be inclined to say "your warranty is void", but it ought to work. -- A bit of tolerance is worth a | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology megabyte of flaming. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
dan@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Dan Trottier) (11/20/89)
This should probably have been mailed to evan@telly but I think the discussion which might follow from posting this would be interesting and enlightning. In article <1989Nov15.172022.511@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >In article <1989Nov14.041714.4650@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes: >>Does the Usenet software currently in use allow me to re-arrange the >>hierarchies *only for the purposes of reading on this site*, without >>scrambling it all up for my feeds (both upstream and downstream). > >No, you'd have to bash on the news readers a fair bit, I would think. >If you aren't concerned about outbound news, you can use C News's "=" >feature to remap groups locally, but that mapping is one-way and will >be visible to anyone you feed. Create a parallel news spool directory (ex /usr/spool/spoof) and make links into /usr/spool/news using whatever names you like. Create a second active file (ex active.spoof) with the new names from spool/spoof. You might actually be able to use upact from Cnews to scan the parallel directory and keep active.spoof up to date. Recompile rn to read from /usr/spool/spoof and use active.spoof when necessary. This should work ok if you aren't concerned about having the Newsgroups: line in article headers match the name of the spoofed group. I haven't tried this but I can't see why it wouldn't work. Things to watch out for: - Posting news - does rn grab the newsgroup name from the Newsgroup: header - Pnews hier.spoofed.group should post to real.group.name - should be straight forward to change Pnews so it gets the proper name. Just check the link. - Cross references - this won't work. should be pretty obvious why. - Saving articles - Rn will create names based on normal newsgroup names and not your spoofed names (I think). I've probably missed a few things here. The nice thing is that you can try this scheme out without changing anything for your regular users. If after a few weeks everything works ok then you can announce the new format to your users. Advantages: - You don't have to run two versions of Cnews and keep two copies of news articles. - Your newsgroup re-organization would be invisible to the outside world. - You are not making any major changes to either the news transport or interface layers. This should make support easier. -- Dan Trottier dan@maccs.dcss.McMaster.CA Dept of Computer Science ...!uunet!utai!utgpu!maccs!dan McMaster University (416) 525-9140 x3444