|Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
|Subject: Re: Pros & cons of passing control.* downstream?
|References: <82rakz8r4p.fsf@dove.eecs.umich.edu>
|From: David C Lawrence <tale@uunet.uu.net>
|Date: 09 Dec 1996 17:47:46 -0500
|Message-ID: <8682bxrl9.fsf@rodan.UU.NET>

Michael Hucka <hucka@eecs.umich.edu> writes:
> The INN man pages say one would not normally want to send out control.* to
> one's peer news servers.  But what are the actual pros and cons of doing it?

The con of doing it is that local control messages will propagate far
and wide, creating groups at distant servers that were meant to be
local.  These groups will then attract articles that aren't really
desired at the home site for the local groups.

It will also look like a path for articles for the groups exist when
in fact it doesn't, because non-control articles will not propagate
down the same path.

This all applies to other messages sites might have intended to keep
local, notably including checkgroups.

Cancels are largely irrelevant in this except by generating a lot of
administrative traffic to cancel articles at the receiving site that
it didn't get.

The very weak pro for doing so is that a site with only a limited feed
can see newgroup messages for groups it might want.  However, admins
can get this information via other mechanisms so I do not believe this
pro outweighs the negatives of leaked local control messages.

-- 
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