From: Brad Templeton (brad@main.templetons.com)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 17:14:33 CDT
On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 02:40:06PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Brad Templeton <brad@main.templetons.com> writes:
>
> The problems caused by a leaking distribution are generally dealt with by
> having separate hierarchies for posts of regional interest, which also
> solves all sorts of other problems that people want to solve and therefore
Huh? In what way does this solve the problem? Every so often I have
a joke in rec.humor.funny that's for the US audience or the Canadian or
the British. You say I should go through the immense work of creating
whole newsgroups for a few jokes a year?
Or say I want to find out who else from the Bay Area is going to see the
eclipse in Europe? Should I create ba.astro.solar just to do this? Sorry,
Russ, but that seems absolutely nuts. The pople who I want to answer the
question would not be reading the group when I created it even if I did.
> would exist anyway. I just don't see why I, as either a Usenet user or
> server administrator, should care about regional distributions. All I see
> is lots of potential for people who don't understand the purpose to screw
> up and accidentally make their post invisible to their audience.
I see no problem with people making posts less visible to their "audience"
at all. If you haven't noticed, one of USENET's problems is that it is
now too large, too global, the audience of any one newsgroup often too
large. Anything that limits the audience is a plus.
Now in fact distributions need not be geographical. They are, as I
propose them, simply subsets of the net, and they can be any subset
at all. Sure they can be "USA" but they can also be "subset that
accepts articles in french" or "subset that accepts articles in HTML"
or "USENET2" or "Freedom Knight Net" or "Subset that listens to cancel
messages from cancelmoose" or anything else people want to
define, and participate in.
What you do as an admin is up to you. You can configure to obey all
distributions and remove ones you like. Or just obey a main set and
add ones you like. Either control what your users read, or store
any subset you like (including all) and let your users decide what to
read, or mix the two.
>
> I don't see anything different in your proposal than has been the case
> with Distribution for years. It doesn't matter who's doing the filtering;
> the fundamental concept just doesn't work. Newsgroup hierarchies are the
> right level at which to make the distinction this is trying for.
One should not have to create a new hierarchy or newsgroup -- a fairly
major effort -- to define a subset of the net and do different things
within it.
Indeed, we've often talked about the idea of net subsets being the place
to try new net features of all stripes, as well as new net policies. That's
all predicated on there being an easy, and functioning, way to subset the
net.
Controlling distributions by having your feed site handle your list failed,
so thus the proposed change in semantics to expecting the control to be
at the recipient end. (Feed control remains, but only for efficiency.)
Today, so many sites use "all,!foo" and it means every distribution that
leaks floods the net. Let the decision to use "all,!foo" or "foo,bar"
be placed with the site or user, the party actually affected.