} Maybe we should consider sending a letter to the news-admin and marketing
} groups at suspected sites and see what the response it. Here is a sample
} letter I just threw together. Only a strawman...
I'd like to see more discussion on this, once this group really has a
chance of understanding of how much spam these policies are trying to
block, and whether trying to lift cross-posting limits will be undoing
some of the hard-fought gains the anti-spam community has made.
} 1) Propagating crossposted articles
You may want to ask, too, whether their cross-posting limits apply
only to postings originating on their system, or articles passing
through.
} 2) Expiring articles in newsgroups
}
} In the past, articles posted to news.answers have benefited from the
} longer expire periods placed on news.answers. Articles crossposted
} to that newsgroup normally stayed around longer since the news software
} was setup to expire articles based on the longest expiration period.
} This allowed readers to benefit from getting many of their questions
} answered without creating additional traffic on the net by posting
} questions that have been answered.
}
} How does your site expire articles ? Based on the longest or the
} shortest expiration period ? Are you keeping news.answers postings
} around longer than normal articles ? If not why not ?
This is far simpler, given the technology:
- are you respecting the expiration headers in unmoderated groups?
- are you respecting the expiration headers on articles in *.answers
and/or moderated groups?
- if not, how short is your expiration period on *.answers groups?
Article expiration is a matter of local site policy, based upon how much
space they want to reserve for news. I have no problem with trying to
remind administrators that the *.answers groups should be kept longer,
the Expires trusted, and the technology exists to make this trivial on their
servers. But increasing posting frequency (as someone else
mentioned, in jest I believe) simply to bypass site decisions, is a big
mistake.
-- For more information on spam, including countermeasures and resources, see the Internet Spam Boycott, at <URL:http://www.vix.com/spam/>.Chris Lewis: _Una confibula non sat est_
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