[Coco] Re: UseNet *"Bit.Listserv.CoCo"* NewsGroup elimination

[John E. Malmberg]

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
> At 12:21 AM 3/29/04 -0500, John E. Malmberg wrote:
>  
> My point is only that I've never seen a cancel message acted upon, if for
> no other reason than news admins can't be chasing down the validity of any
> given one of a few hundred thousand groups. Since the chance of a cancel
> message for a newsgroup being acted upon is so insignificant, what is the
> worry here?

One of my news readers is anu-news.  It has an annoying feature that 
when I start it up, it lets me know about all the newsgroups that have 
been deleted since I last ran it, and then it starts asking me about all 
the ones that have been created.  Fortunately the letter "Q" skips that 
dialog.

So yes, newsgroups do get deleted.  If the owner of the bit.listserv.* 
sends out a delete command, and also deletes the newsgroup on their 
server, it would probably blank it out for quite a number of servers.

In many cases, the major new server operators appear to have traffic 
monitors.  If they get a delete request, and show no traffic on the 
newsgroup for some period of time, then they would have no reason not to 
act on it.

And some news servers will only pull newsgroups from their peers if they 
detect that their customers are actually reading articles on those 
newsgroups.  It saves bandwidth to do that.

The first time a user subscribes to a newsgroup that is not carried, 
there is a small delay as it pulls down the current articles.

> I'd certainly like to gate it somehow from gmane with the
> munged addresses, but with the spam issues, it would be one-way. That would
> result in broken threads because of the inability to post from
> bit.listserv.coco back to gmane or maltedmedia.

I can probably have a one-way feed from the newsgroup to your mailing 
list running in a week or less.  Keeping threading context would be 
hard.  I am not sure how to reconstruct the reference header.

I am already replicating it in to an encompasserve.org notes file as an 
experiment.  I can copy all postings back to your mailing list.

Due to the low volume on the bit.listserv.coco, my moderator/copy 
program is now only running once a day.  I can set it to a 15 minute delay.

It could cause some initial confusion because some people post copies 
there of what they post here, and I do not have a way to filter that out.

> Now, something more important, in my mind:
> 
> There is a hard-core group over there waving the "bit.listserv.coco is the
> original group" flag. I understand that Randy, Rogelio, and others have
> that sense of loyalty, but I don't know if there is an *effective*
> long-term solution.
> 
> Anyone have a solid idea of how to make it work?

The simplest way is to do a lookup on the active mailing lists on 
Princeton.edu, and find out if any of them are close to the same type of 
topics for the COCO list.  If you can get that list owner to also adopt 
the COCO list, then it would get turned back on.  If the mailing list is 
set to self-moderation mode, you have to subscribe to post.

If such a list is not available on Princeton.edu, but is available on 
another bitnet host.  Then it is possible that they could take over the 
list.

Failing those two methods, it is possible that a polite query could be 
done to newsadmin.com to let them know that there are still active users 
of the newsgroup, and find out what needs to be done to transfer the 
newsgroup to one or more COCO enthusiasts to be the designated 
contact/moderators.

Even if moderation is not turned on, designated moderators can cancel 
spam and abusive posts.

My recommendation, is that if someone gets control of the mailing list 
to consider setting up a computer to be a moderator robot.

The usual implementation is for the moderator robot to build a list of 
approved posters, and hold the rest for a human.  A special code word 
can be used in the title for members to whitelist a new address.

On the encompasserve experiment, the moderator robot assumes that 
newsgroup posters are valid until proved otherwise.  I should be able to 
make a minor change to feed that into your mailing list.

The newserver that it gets it's feed from is not seeing the spam on the 
bit.listserv.coco that others are reporting, so it would be rare for 
spam to make it through.

On three of the four news servers that I can get bit.listserv.coco on, 
no spam is showing up.

> If I can arrange somehow
> to gate gmane.comp.hardware.tandy.coco over to bit.listserv.coco (with the
> munged addresses), along with a footer that indicates that posting back via
> bit.listserv.coco isn't possible, is that even somewhat workable?

If Newsadmin and Princeton are willing to cooperate, and I do not see 
why they would not, Newsadmin will take care of a bi-directional gateway 
to an existing mailing list.

As far as gating this mailing list or it's gmane mirror into the 
bit.listserv.coco, I do not know if the people that are still there 
would like that or not.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
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