sdo@u1100a.UUCP (Scott Orshan) (05/09/84)
> a possible solution. How about setting up a mail alias of > "wanted" on every system, such that mailing to "wanted" will post the > article to the smallest possible distribution that the site is a part > of. Thus, to post something to chi.wanted, I could just find a site > in Chicago (via the usenet maps) and mail my letter to > .....!<chicago-site>!wanted . That's a very good idea. I had thought of having a "carrier" type newsgroup that nobody read, but was used to carry external distribution news. Thus, one could post to net.carrier,chi.wanted. This would mean that the article goes everywhere, but only chi sites see it. The advantage of the mail alias idea is that the article doesn't have to be carried all over the world. Is it only the Berkeley UNIX mail that allows this aliasing, or can anyone do it? This goes along with my other suggestion that the local distributions be published in the monthly newsgroup list. If this scheme is adopted, the gateway sites will have to appear in this list. Readnews should eventually be modified to inform the reader that an article in a local newsgroup came from outside the dist. This is so proprietary information won't accidentally be released in a reply to an article. The only remaining problem is that the original poster will never see any followup discussion on the topic. Maybe the "followup" command should mail each article to the originator of the discussion. I think a discussion of the network structure is in order. I will start thinking about it, and I encourage discussion in net.news. I have added net.news to this article's newsgroup list. Would anyone who follows this up please remove net.followup from the list? Scott Orshan Bell Communications Research 201-981-3064 {ihnp4,allegra,pyuxww}!u1100a!sdo