Apur-ee.196
net.news
utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!davy
Mon Dec 28 21:04:56 1981
More comments on USENET policies
Well, I saw some intersting things suggested this evening on what
could/should/would take place with the new news policies.  I guess
I'll make some comments:

       1. Greg Ordy's idea of polls.  In my mind, this is a great
       idea, and one that I would think fairly easy to implement.
       Many things could be done with this, aside from just stuff
       by the news "committee".  For example:

               We have a suggestion to abolish/accept/rename/relocate
               newsgroup X.Y.Z.  What is your opinion?

                       [] YES   [] NO   [] UNDECIDED (UNINTERESTED)

       If it was done right, this could be a command somehow similar
       to "inews" (news -i for you A versioners), that sends an
       initial poll out to each machine (in turn, passed around all
       over the network).  Then, the thing sits around in some directory
       and there's a program "pollcheck" (just like "newscheck") that
       out and looks for polls.
       Neat, huh?

       2. Personally, I like the net-pers distinction, because, if
       nothing else, you can tell what type of stuff you're going
       to read right away (assuming people manage to put the stuff in
       the right group).  One could even modify readnews to have a
       -P and -N flag, for "only pers" or "only net" items.

       3. Somewhere I saw something about having news snarf the user's
       name from the password file upon submission of the article.  I
       think this is a great idea, but I can see it being misused (or
       rather, "gotten around"), such as:

               from foo!bar!sna!fu!user
               In real life: user, guest account, oozer, etc.

       But, all in all, I think it's better than nothing.  It would
       be nice if Berkely's Mail program did that too (ours doesn't,
       anyway), since it's next to impossible to figure out who is
       really behind "let me know" when everything is from
       ucbvax!unix-wizards or whatever......


Oh, well, I guess I better go slink into my corner now.....

--Dave Curry
(pur-ee!davy)

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