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Subject: 
Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Tue, 4 Jan 2000 18:58:34 GMT
Reply-To: 
mattdm@mattdm%Spamcake%.org
Viewed: 
1946 times
  
Todd Lehman <lehman@javanet.com> wrote:
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

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 remainder:

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

seems like exactly what makes sense.


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.

Yes, that's true.

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.

I have the belief that a good, automated solution could be devised. :)


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.

Agreed. I think newsreaders don't do this because, as we've discussed, it
really requires the newsgroup layout to be done in a certain way, and Usenet
(and the Usenet-like groups generally distributed alongside) isn't arranged
like that. Anyway, the practical fact is that clients don't support this, so
if it's a desired feature, it's much more reasonable to do it on the server.



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:

I thought about this. It'd work if newsreaders _only_ check the newsgroup
line when marking messages read and replying and so forth -- if they have a
concept of "current group I'm reading", it'd probably break in various ways.

I think that slrn actually looks at the newsgroups line each time it does
something, so it'd probably work. But I'm not sure -- hafta do some more
digging. And there almost certainly are perfectly good newsreaders out there
that would break.


Anyway, I don't think this solution is more clean than modifying the
Newsgroups line, except for the problem of moving articles. And I'm
optimistic above the solvablity of that one. :)


--
Matthew Miller                      --->                  mattdm@mattdm.org
Quotes 'R' Us                       --->             http://quotes-r-us.org/



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
 
(...) And it would automatically go out to all the webpages on the net and fix up the links where people say things like "discuss this on LUGNET" and give a link to the article they posted? And it would automatically go back through all the news (...) (25 years ago, 4-Jan-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
 
(...) 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 (...) (25 years ago, 4-Jan-00, to lugnet.admin.general)

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