sasdvp@sas.UUCP (David V. Phillips) (09/22/89)
When posting to a moderated newsgroup, is it generally better to post to the newsgroup, or mail to the moderator. If it is better to mail to the moderator, how does one find out who the moderator is? (I'm specifically looking for the rec.guns moderator.) Separately, what is the name of the file that contains the different distributions available on a machine? -- David Phillips sasdvp@sas.UUCP ...!mcnc!rti!sas!sasdvp "Gun control is using both hands."
bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) (09/23/89)
In article <1245@sas.UUCP> sasdvp@sas.UUCP (David V. Phillips) writes:
: When posting to a moderated newsgroup, is it generally better to post to
: the newsgroup, or mail to the moderator. If it is better to mail to the
: moderator, how does one find out who the moderator is? (I'm specifically
: looking for the rec.guns moderator.)
If you can post to a moderated newsgroup (assuming your software
isn't broken and that you haven't lied to the software with an
Approved: line), it gets mailed to the moderator for you. In which
case, just post. If posting to a moderated newsgroup gets your
message rejected immediately, send e-mail. With a few exceptions, you
can send e-mail to the moderator by mailing to a mail alias maintained
on a so-called (for historical and now irrelevant reasons) "backbone"
site. A site I might use is uunet; to mail to comp.sys.sun, I could
send to uunet!comp-sys-sun.
The list of "backbone" sites is available, as are the real addresses
for moderators, in monthly postings in one of the news.all
newsgroups, I'm not sure which. (maybe news.lists,
news.announce.newusers, news.admin, or news.misc).
If you know where the news library directory is (maybe /usr/lib/news
but I've never been on a system with a standard news setup so I
wouldn't know), a file "mailpaths" in it may contain a line like "all
uunet!%s" or "backbone uunet!%s"; if so, one of those would give you
the method of constructing the right mail alias. But, then again, if
you have that file, your software probably does this for you
anyway....
: Separately, what is the name of the file that contains the different
: distributions available on a machine?
In that same news library directory you might find a file
"distributions".
---
Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com