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 Administrative / General / 4070
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Subject: 
Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Tue, 4 Jan 2000 18:30:56 GMT
Viewed: 
1640 times
  
In lugnet.admin.general, mattdm@mattdm.org (Matthew Miller) writes:

Jasper Janssen <jasper@janssen.dynip.com> wrote:
and la. When posting a new article to an umbrella group, unless there
is an x-post to non-umbrella group specified, the server rejects the
post. Simplicity itself, nah? :)

Yeah, that's a good idea and would do a lot for making the system work.
You'd probably want to have a lot of ".general" groups....

Hmmm, seems pretty messy to me, especially for deep hierarchies where there
are many nested umbrealla groups.  In that scenario, aren't you saying that
if someone posted to lugnet.loc.us.ma.bos, the message would actually have
to be crossposted (either automatically or manually) as this?--

   Newsgroups: lugnet.loc.us.ma.bos,lugnet.loc.us.ma,lugnet.loc.us,
               lugnet.loc,lugnet

It would also mean that anytime a group were split, it would have to die and
be moved to a .general subgroup so that it could be reborn as an umbrella
group.  For practical reasons, it's extremely difficult (next to impossible
in an automated way) to move messages out of a non-empty newsgroup and into
a new one, and it's not reasonable simply to throw them away.


So we can have
lugnet.themes.town.minifigs.postmen
lugnet.themes.town.minifigs.bakers
lugnet.themes.town.minifigs.telecoms-engineers
lugnet.themes.town.minifigs.ISP-geeks • [snip]
This one is very much an example, BTW, in case you hadn't guessed ;) .

Hey, y'know, I wasn't serious when the idea was first proposed. But now I
kinda like it. Whatdya say, Todd -- wanna throw the entire status quo into
chaos for the sake of a better system for the future? *grin*

The client side is really the appropriate place for that, IMHO.  I wonder
why the popular newsreaders don't have an option to coalesce groups down a
hierarchy (or some set of specified groups).  I've never seen that feature
in a newsreader except in the LUGNET web interface.

Alternatively, on the server side, an nntpd doesn't actually know (or care)
what group an article _actually_ is in (as specified by it's 'Newsgroups:'
header) when it transmits the article's header and body.  Normally, they
match, but they wouldn't have to.  Thus a virtual group consisting of a
collection of other group's messages could actually contain hard or symbolic
links to the article files in the other groups without even having to mess
with crossposting.  In other words, a group foo.bar could theoretically
contain a collection of messages with Newsgroups headers like this:

   Newsgroups: foo.bar
   Newsgroups: foo.bar.bletch
   Newsgroups: foo.bar.blat
   Newsgroups: foo.bar.bletch
   Newsgroups: foo.bar.gork.splat
   etc.

and when the client composes a reply, the reply actually goes into the
proper groups (rather than into foo.bar) and then is echoed back into
foo.bar as if it had actually appeared there.  Some newsreaders may have
problems with a layout like that, though, if they checked the newsgroup line
against the current group that someone was in and gave an error if there was
a mismatch.

--Todd



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
 
(...) Well, not the last one for sure. And probably not "lugnet.loc", either. (Groups which don't exist don't get crossposted to; seem reasonable. This lets you not make those groups which don't make sense. You've done this already, right?) And the (...) (24 years ago, 4-Jan-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
  Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
 
(...) I'd leave off the lugnet, but yeah, that's the idea. I'm still not entirely convinced it wouldbe a good thing, though. (...) Hmm. Which would mean that you would have to create every single group as a .general. Bad. (...) I'd like it. Does (...) (24 years ago, 5-Jan-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
 
(...) Yeah, that's a good idea and would do a lot for making the system work. You'd probably want to have a lot of ".general" groups.... (...) [snip] (...) Hey, y'know, I wasn't serious when the idea was first proposed. But now I kinda like it. (...) (24 years ago, 4-Jan-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

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