From: Bill Davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com)
Date: Wed Jan 12 2000 - 11:16:54 CST
chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) noted:
> Yes, but to do that you need to keep a history file, which is exactly what
> current 'news routers' apparently do not do. Do you want to outlaw that
> practice?
I'm sure news routers keep a history file, otherwise you would accept
articles multiple times, and at 80-100GB/day you really don't want that.
last time I looked I was rejecting (already had) about 80% of what I was
offered, and my feeds are better now than they were.
> In any case, it has never been the case that sites are required to keep an
> active file of every group on the planet, so there is no way they could
> catch articles crossposted to moderated groups outside of their ken. So we
> could not make that a MUST requirement in any absolute sense.
We could, but virtually no one would do it, and even fewer would do it
right. It could result in new groups starting very slowly, and some
hierarchies effectively vanishing because they aren't in a few active
files.
At the moment I don't think we have widely available software to treat
a small number of hierarchies as "known" to the point that you would
drop any unknown groups there but accept all groups in other hierarchies
as valid. I could do it with cleanfeed, I'm not sure I want to on a
transit machine.
-- -bill davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me