Jonadab the Unsightly One <jonadab@bright.net> writes:
> Certainly, *.answers shouldn't count toward the crossposting limit. The
> people with the most power to change this are the maintainers of INN,
> but I get the impression that INN is pretty much completely braindead
> about special groups.
The INN documentation explicitly recommends against the use of this option
in favor of using other ones that will pass *.answers traffic just fine.
Perhaps we should just remove it entirely; I think there was some
objection to that previously, though.
I really doubt INN is much of the problem these days; most of the large
sites making these sorts of stupid decisions aren't running INN, but
instead are running other transit news servers that are optimized for
throwing news around as quickly as possible (which INN is not).
> It doesn't exclude *.answers from being counted toward the crossposting
> limit; it doesn't watchdog against posts with news.admin.* in the
> Followup-To: header but not in the Newsgroups: header;
If you want to do filtering of this sort, that's the role of programs like
Cleanfeed. I don't consider it to be the role of a news server to make
these sorts of site-specific filtering decisions; the news server
implements the protocol and doesn't care what news groups it's carrying.
> it allows news.answers to be matched by a wildcard pattern in the expiry
> config file.
The sort of special-case exception that you're advocating here is a
maintenance nightmare. It requires a disproportional amount of
documentation and it confuses people. Putting this sort of thing into a
software package in essence makes the assumption that the author of the
software knows better than the installer how the software should be used,
and I'm loathe to make that sort of decision.
Adding special cases to the software isn't an effective way of dealing
with people who do not know how to properly configure it. It just makes
the configuration problems even stranger.
> Actually, INN could stand a number of improvments; this is just one of
> them. It also needs better multipost detection heuristics (although
> markov chains would evade even the best automated heuristics, but the
> markov chains are mostly coming from certain select subnets that can be
> blocked based on the feed path, if the news admins are with it), among
> other things.
Again, this is why there's a filtering interface. You can use Perl or
Python; knock yourself out. If you release your filter, any site using
INN will be able to just drop it in.
Cleanfeed is maintained at <http://www.bofh.it/~md/cleanfeed/> and has a
mailing list of contributors; I imagine they'd probably be interested in
any ideas you have.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>************************************************************* To unsubscribe send a message to majordomo@faqs.org as
unsubscribe faq-maintainers fill-in-your-email-address-here *************************************************************
[
FAQ Archive |
Search FAQ Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet References
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997 |
1998 |
1999 |
2000
]
© Copyright The Internet FAQ Consortium, 1997-2000
All rights reserved