The fact that something this revolutionary is coming from *Netcom* startles
me. Netcom is to order on the internet as Larry Flynt is to decency in
communications. I welcome their policy changes.
In your message "FAQs and crossposting policies," sent at 7:34 PM -0500 on
2/3/97, you said:
>I customarily read netnews at netcom.com, a fairly large West Coast ISP.
>The newsadmins there are busily implementing some policy changes that
>are likely to have a negative impact on FAQs. Specifically, they
>intend to:
>
>1. Expire a cross-posted article on the basis of the *shortest*
>expiration time of any newsgroup it is posted to, not the longest.
As I understand this locally, the expiration time for alt* is something on
the order of 72 hours, possibly 96. For a FAQ posted weekly, this means
that at any given time a user has about a 50% chance of finding the FAQ in
his/her newsfeed. Of course, your milage may vary, but I find this an
acceptable outcome. Besides, how many people grep news.answers for FAQs
anyway - there are something like 4000 there on a regular basis.
>2. Additionally discriminate, via early expiration, against any article
>cross-posted to more than a threshold number of newsgroups (four was
>the threshold mentioned).
<warm applause> An excellent spam fighting tool. I'm of the opinion (and
I'm sure people here will disagree) that if your posting something to more
than a certain number of groups, it needs to be more tailored or your
selection of groups needs to be more certain. Certain FAQs certainly are
shuffled around the newsgroups a bit - my own appears in a.f.s-b,
alt.answers and news.answers - this would be 3 of the 4 netcom would allow.
Personally, I would like to see a rethinking of the whole news.answers
concept - perhaps a bot could keep FAQs current in the *answers groups or
something.
>The stated reason for making these changes is to reduce spool area
>consumption by (improperly) crossposted binaries and widely-crossposted
>flamefests. However, the changes will pretty much destroy the ability
>of FAQs to persist in the local spool between postings: not only will
>a long expire time for news.answers not help (not that they ever had
>one at netcom) but rule #2 will target any FAQ with more than one
>home newsgroup. I have not seen the implementation, but I imagine that
>application of rule #2 would override any Expires: header in the article.
I'd think so too, but I'm no expert. I like your idea (trimmed for space)
of exempting from the 4-group-crosspost-rule anything that has one of the
groups as news.answers. That would be an effective solution.
>What bothers me most about the situation is that the admins seem to think
>that *most* sites are implementing policies like this, or soon will.
>Apparently these ideas are fairly generally accepted in the news.admin
>newsgroups (which I have not kept up on for a long time).
It's about stinkin time. Crossposted dreck is nearly on par with
unsolicited commercial posting on my ire scale. The stupid crossposted
threads are damn near impossible to kill, and no one is really to blame or
responsible for their propagation. Even my quick blame trigger finger is
lax to blow away a stupid newbie who follows up a huge crossposted thread.
It's hard to have them correct their action without a 15 minute explanation
about nettiquette and how Usenet works.
>So, if you think that well-run sites are likely to be keeping FAQs around
>for the stated expiration interval, think again. One-day expiration may
>soon be the norm.
Naaaah. That's too short for me to go away on Friday, come back on Monday
and see what I missed. I don't think it'll get any lower than 3 days
without a lot of complaining.
>Is there anything that FAQ authors as a group can or should do about this?
>Or should we just accept it as life in the nineties, and revise our own
>working habits to fit within such policies? Maybe the crosspost policies
>for news.answers need to be rethought.
I'm personally in favor of it. Situationally, it doesn't affect the
a.f.s-b FAQ at all, and helps kill a huge Usenet problem. I'd agree that
news.answers needs to be reworked a bit though.
T
____________________________________________________
Todd C. Lawson, Tempe, AZ, USA
Sandra Bullock FAQ: http://www.amug.org/~tlawson/sandyfaq.html
Attracting visitors from more than 79 countries!
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