Stupid reposting service (was Re: SLIP/getty/printers on Ter

[Edward Vielmetti]

In article <15006 at bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes:

   It's worth pointing out in all contexts -- but especially in the
   realm of large source postings -- that news articles don't arrive
   at sites cost free, KILL files notwithstanding.  Cross posting
   allows articles to appear in multiple useful places with only
   the cost of one distribution, but RE-posted sources from some
   individual newsreader's site forces people to bear the cost of
   two distributions, unless they want to forgo the use of the group
   (which means missing original postings too).

Too true.  It is a potential waste of bandwidth to shovel things
around twice, so the solution will have to be a way to not send the
reposted articles in the first place.

The easy (and somewhat brute-force) way is to stop getting alt.sources
entirely, but that's overkill for sure; you're likely to miss a lot
of good stuff that way.  Somewhat more trickly but still doable is to
wipe out articles coming from the offending site, with a B news sys
file something like this on your upstream feed(s):

	yoursite:world,...,alt,!alt.sources,...
	yoursite/offending-reposting-site:world,alt.sources,...

where 'offending-reposting-site' is the name in the Path: header which
is responsible for the errand deed.  There's a risk to this; the
miscreant might actually post something useful from that site, so you
could wipe out too much.

If anyone's contemplating this approach, let me know, and I'll change
the Path: headers that I'm creating from the generic ones I have now
to tack in a different one that's only ever going to occur in the 
context of reposted articles.  I'll probably make it go from
	Path: math.lsa.umich.edu!emv
to
	Path: math.lsa.umich.edu!derrida.math.lsa.umich.edu!emv
so you can put
	yoursite/derrida.math.lsa.umich.edu:....
in your sys file.

It's too bad there isn't the equivalent of kill files for news
relaying -- if I were to get a newsfeed at home I might want to have a
news clip type service run on the feeder machine and have it send me
only what I want from the newsgroups I'm interested in.  Anyone have
this running now ?

--Ed