From: Andrew Gierth (andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk)
Date: Wed Aug 29 2001 - 22:37:07 CDT
>>>>> "Curt" == Curt Welch <curt@kcwc.com> writes:
Curt> Nope. Just the opposit. My server may be the only one in the
Curt> world which blocks peolple from posting to groups which don't
Curt> exist. All the other severs I know about let you cross post to
Curt> non-existent groups as long as you spell at least one of the
Curt> group names correctly. My server on the other hand forces you
Curt> to spell every group name correctly or else the post is
Curt> rejected.
[...]
Curt> Exactly. I stop it where it should be stopped, at the point of
Curt> injection. If all the other servers on Usenet were as good as
Curt> mine in that regard, spelling errors in the Newsgroups line
Curt> wouldn't be the problem that it is today.
Of course, if every server behaved the way yours did, no new newsgroup
would ever get created, other than by a local site admin overriding
his server to add a group, something I recall you've criticised on
(IMO spurious) liability grounds, and there would be no way to create
new moderated groups, ever. (How do _you_ handle creation of moderated
groups, anyway?)
The idea of auto-creating every group seen in a Newsgroups header was,
I believe, abandoned very early on in the early development of Usenet,
and rightly so.
Right now, I'm seeing about 70,000 newsgroup names mentioned in a
week's worth of raw newsfeed; about 37,000 of those appear only in
articles rejected in the spam filter, leaving about 33,000 groups
mentioned in the accepted traffic. Several hundred of those are
syntactically invalid (usually improper punctuation), and a few
thousand more are misspellings, concatenated names caused by replacing
',' with '.', active file artifacts (group names with unexpected
numeric strings overwriting parts of the name, or unused hierarchy
nodes that have turned into groups), truncated group names, case
conversions, and other bogosity.
[snip lots of stuff about group administration, which which I totally
disagree, and lots of stuff about the impracticality of mvgroup, which
which I mostly agree]
-- Andrew.