>>>>> "Jonadab" == Jonadab the Unsightly One <jonadab@bright.net> writes:
Jonadab> Certainly, *.answers shouldn't count toward the crossposting
Jonadab> limit. The people with the most power to change this are
Jonadab> the maintainers of INN, but I get the impression that INN is
Jonadab> pretty much completely braindead about special groups. It
Jonadab> doesn't exclude *.answers from being counted toward the
Jonadab> crossposting limit; it doesn't watchdog against posts with
Jonadab> news.admin.* in the Followup-To: header but not in the
Jonadab> Newsgroups: header; it allows news.answers to be matched by
Jonadab> a wildcard pattern in the expiry config file. These are
Jonadab> just the things I have noticed.
All of these are local policy matters that should not be coded in the
server; this is why INN has filter interfaces both at the local post
level and for incoming transit feeds.
BTW, there are quite a few legitimate posts that have followups set to
news.admin.* but which are not posted to any news.admin.* group. You
need to be a bit more precise than that to correctly identify the
recent flooding attempts.
Recent versions of INN _do_ have a useful alternative ("C") to the
infamous "G" newsfeeds flag, allowing followup-to to be taken into
account when setting crosspost limits on feeds. This approach gives
you most of the advantages of limiting crossposts without most of the
disadvantages (since FAQs, legitimate announcement posts, etc., should
always have followup-to set narrowly).
Jonadab> Actually, INN could stand a number of improvments; this
Jonadab> is just one of them. It also needs better multipost
Jonadab> detection heuristics
That's an issue for the external filter, not for INN itself (not least
because filters can be written so that they work not only under INN but
also for DNews, Diablo, Typhoon, etc.).
Trying to fold all the filter functionality into the server itself is
a very bad idea.
Jonadab> (although markov chains would evade even the best automated
Jonadab> heuristics, but the markov chains are mostly coming from
Jonadab> certain select subnets that can be blocked based on the feed
Jonadab> path, if the news admins are with it), among other things.
The "newsagent"-style flooding does not use markov chains and is pretty
easy to filter for (especially since the source code is available for
inspection).
Jonadab> If I were a news admin, I would make darn sure certain
Jonadab> special groups are excluded from the count and then set the
Jonadab> maximum to 2 or _maybe_ 3 at the absolute outside. Barring
Jonadab> special cases (most notably *.answers), there is really
Jonadab> never any excuse to post the same message to more than three
Jonadab> groups, ever.
All I can say is that it's this kind of thinking that has led to the
current problems of inappropriate crosspost filters.
If you're going to filter something, you need to think hard about not
only what you intend to eliminate, but also what will be eliminated
that you _didn't_ intend. In most cases, you won't be able to predict
the full consequences of any given filter, so you need to run it on a
separate box, or in logging-only mode, and look at exactly what is
being rejected.
-- Andrew. (professional newsadmin)************************************************************* To unsubscribe send a message to majordomo@faqs.org as
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