kjones@talos.uu.net (Kyle Jones) (12/19/89)
T. William Wells writes per-user nuking of the source reposting: > If you use rn, you might try using a kill file. Those postings > have headers which should be easy enough to filter out. Or, if > not, I'm sure Ed could arrange that it be so. Tom Neff writes: > It's worth pointing out in all contexts -- but especially in the > realm of large source postings -- that news articles don't arrive at > sites cost free, KILL files notwithstanding. [...] RE-posted sources > from some individual newsreader's site forces people to bear the cost > of two distributions [...] > > So while it's important to know about KILL files, they don't > fully replace proper posting to begin with. The trick of course is to get proper postings. The recent and not so recent history of alt.sources has aptly demonstrated how difficult such postings are to come by. On the other hand, the charter of alt.sources.index can be easily extended to allow for indices to other newsgroups. Someone could decide that they would keep track of source postings in, say, comp.emacs and make a weekly alt.sources.index posting that looked something like: Newsgroups: alt.sources.index From: elves@magic-tree.keebler.com (Those Keebler Elves) Newsgroups-Indexed: comp.emacs Subject: comp.emacs index for the week ending 16 December 1989 ... and so forth, and list the message-IDs in the body of the message. I can't imagine anyone watching ALL the newsgroups, but comp.emacs gets enough source postings that it would be worthwhile to cover. kyle jones <kjones@talos.uu.net> ...!uunet!talos!kjones
kjones@talos.uu.net (Kyle Jones) (12/20/89)
Edward Vielmetti writes: > The problem with the existing alt.sources.index is that there > really isn't a lot of information in there -- no article titles, > no people names, no sense of what might be useful or not. > > If you don't already have those articles on your spool partition, > I'd have a hard time arguing that you should get them all just > in case they were interesting. > > Not that it's a bad idea, don't get me wrong -- just that it could > add a little more value than just the Message-IDs and better > accomplish its stated goal. > > --Ed alt.sources.index does what it is intended to do: identify sources. "Interesting" and "sources" are synonymous in the context of alt.sources.index. This also seems to be the basic assumption under which the reposting service is operating; anything goes as long as it's source, correct? If so, then alt.sources.index is obviously the more economical of the two schemes. I'm not averse to others posting indices in alt.sources.index, provided the proper article format is used. As for human readable indices, does anyone else think the format of alt.sources.index should be changed to have some human readable data along with the message-IDs? Now is the time to make such changes, while there is yet little or no software that will be broken by the change. What I have in mind is a second field surrounded by double quotes that gives a terse description of what the article is.