From: Curt Welch (curt@kcwc.com)
Date: Wed Aug 29 2001 - 23:21:05 CDT
Andrew Gierth writes:
> 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?)
I accept and honor all newgroup commands. But I don't
(in theory) allow "normal" users to post newgroup commands.
I can create groups by hand of course as well with special
local admin commands (ctrlinnd newgroup types of things),
but that's not used normally.
So this means that if everyone used my logic, normal users
would not be able to create new groups. But any user that
could get access to a privileged account which allowed
posting of newgroup messages, could create groups.
> 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.
In the early development of usenet no one every expected Usenet
to get as large as it is today either. Other people I know have
tried it as well. The one guy I know that tried turned it
off fairly quickly when he saw how many bogus newsgroup
names where posted to usenet very day simply because the
user typed the name wrong and the software (both the newsreader
and the news server) didn't stop them from posting it.
> 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.
My server BTW has a fairly strict definiton of what a
"valid" newsgroup name looks like and won't create anything
that's outside the range of what it considers to be a valid
name. That cuts out a ton of really bogus groups (like
"alt..b" or "alt.") etc.. But there are still lots of valid
looking names which are bogus.
My main nntp server has 102K groups defined right now, but of
those, only 80K are being shown to the users in a LIST
ACTIVE command (the 22K hidden are inactive empty groups that
will be removed before too long if no one posts another
message to them). So with todays Usenet, that shows you how
many bogus groups are constantly floating around. It's not
unworkable by any means with todays usenet.
BTW, my server also supports the altopia user name options
to allow a user to filter the active list based on the
number of articles in the group. i.e. a user name such
as "curt:n5" will cause LIST ACTIVE to only list groups
which have 5 or more articles posted to them. So I'm trying
to give my users some tools to deal with the problems
of my "newgroup everything logic" as well.