From: Bill Davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com)
Date: Fri Aug 24 2001 - 13:00:15 CDT
curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
> It's understood that all news servers and news admins
> will end up doing what they feel is "right" with these
> messages, and what they feel they "can" do based on their
> design, but the draft should read...
>
> 1) The new group SHOULD be created.
>
> 2) All articles arriving from peers which list the old
> group SHOULD be filed under the new group instead of the
> old group (this will be reflected in the Xref:, but the
> Newsgroups: line of course should not be changed.)
>
> 3) Any local users trying to POST to the old group
> SHOULD have the POST rejected with a message indicating
> the reason and the name of the new group.
[... snip ...]
> In summary...
>
> First, mvgroup is questionable for Usenet because of the
> abuse issues. But it's not worthless because it does help
> communicate the intent even if most servers will have it
> disabled. I wouldn't waste my time adding it to a standard,
> but I don't mind if ends up as part of the standard.
There are no abuse issues. At least none not present if separate control
messages were issued to do the same thing. Most modern server software
has the ability to handle PGP signed control messages and drop the rest.
So this is a non-issue in terms of additional abuse. All implementations
will be new implementations, and if admin is poor at least I would
expect the option to ignore or validate messages would exist.
> Second, I for one, will probably ignore it because of the
> abuse issues, and because group renames already work fine
> on my server and require no attention on my part.
Having stated what needs to be done, you now propose to ignore it? If no
one drops the old group it will never die, at least on your system.
> Third, if you do add it to the standard, just make it simple
> and obvious and don't over specify what the server should
> do with it. The above 3 SHOULD's I think is all that is
> needed to clearly describe the "correct" way for a server
> to implement the control message. If any server decides
> not to do it that way, it's no big deal. The intent of the
> message is clear no matter what the server does with it.
I have mostly said that this isn't needed, but at least if simplified it
could be useful if people run servers which implement it correctly.
There will always be poorly run sites which create hundreds of
unapproved groups, finger checks and the like, but if we can make things
easier for those who care to run a good site, that's an improvement. All
the move articles stuff is not even worth a SHOULD, anyone who cares
about it will do it.
-- -bill davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me