At 03:41 AM -0500 12/28/01, Ganesh wrote:
>Edward Reid will probably help you out any time now ;-)
Aw, I was waiting for you to answer ... anyway, lots of people have
looked at this problem in the past; perhaps most of them are on
vacation this week.
>Have you thought of using the faq-server at mit.edu to post your faq
>if you
>want to post to one more NG?
The problem is that it's not just throttled posting -- many news
servers now refuse to *receive* articles with cross-posting over
certain arbitrary limits, and almost always with no consideration for
*.answers.
>I really doubt that there can be that many faqs which can be of
>interest to
>more
>than 3 mainstream NGs. ;-)
Remember that if you cross-post to two primary newsgroups in different
hierarchies, then you also need three *.answers groups, and you are
already up to five.
At 02:36 PM -0800 12/27/01, John O. Kopf wrote:
>I'm on AT&T, and I've not seen them for years. Talking to people on
>other ISPs, they apparently don't see them either.
It looks like even Usenetserver -- one of the large outsourcing Usenet
providers -- is dropping these articles. As a direct customer, I will
ask them ... Google *does* have the articles in question, so they
aren't being blocked from leaving MIT.
>I've tried to get info out of AT&T, but the "customer service" people
>have never heard of "news", and keep talking about web sites!
Yeah, that's going to be a problem with a lot of outfits now. AT&T may
still be running their own news server. But with smaller ISPs, you now
generally have to find out who they outsource Usenet from, and contact
that news provider directly.
>The problem apparently is that AT&T throttles cross-posting, rejecting
>any article posted to more than 4 groups at once (this has apparently
>become an internet standard).
Not a standard, but certainly common practice.
>I'm not sure how to proceed on this, but suggest that the "rules" be
>modified to exempt the *.answers newsgroups from the "no more than 4
>crossposts" rule (i.e., not count them toward crossposting).
>
>My faq goes to rec.models.scale,rec.models.rc.water,rec.answers, and
>news.answers. I'm right there at the limit, and fear to post to
>another
>group, such as alt.answers.
>
>Thoughts?
Something about tilting at windmills comes to mind. As you've
discovered, most ISPs are very little concerned with Usenet now. Usenet
users are the minority, and those who even realize that Usenet is not
just a web site, have figured it out for themselves and don't ask their
ISP.
OTOH, precisely because most ISPs now outsource Usenet, it is mostly
under the control of a few providers. This raises the interesting
possibility that approaching a few of these major providers (such as
Supernews and Usenetserver and a couple of others) might have major
effects.
>(while we're at it, it would be useful if the ISPs retained the
>*.answers groups for at least a month - AT&T keeps articles for 1
>week!)
Now that's really bad. Usenetserver keeps text groups for three months,
binaries for less than a week. Either AT&T isn't distinguishing between
text and binary newsgroups, or more likely they simply aren't buying
enough disk.
Edward Reid
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