According to Mark Gendron:
>
> (What follows is my understanding of how Usenet works, please correct me if
> I have mis-stated anything).
>
> Usenet is a distributed database of discussion groups that are hosted on
> various "news servers" on the Internet.
Thousands of them!!!
> If a particular discussion group
> is intended to be public, then other news servers can subscribe to it.
All USENET News is public. Some people use News Software to run local
setups, but they are not a part of USENET (as a piece of trivia, USENET
predates the INTERNET as most people know it and although I don't have
exact dates at hand, it probably predates the APRANET wihich was the
private pre-cursor to the INTERNET.) All news posted to a USENET News
Server is sent to all other News Servers (with minor exceptions I will
address in a minute.)
> Typically, your Internet service provider (AOL, MSN, Earthlink, etc.)
> will offer a news server through which you can access the various Usenet
> discussion lists. There are tens of thousands of discussion groups on the
> Internet, and your ISP is unlikely to subscribe to all of them.
While true in general, there is rhyme and reason to this decision. USENET
is loosely divided into what are called "The Big 8", "alt" and "regional"
groups. The Big 8 have the best distribution and can be counted on at 99%
of News servers. They are also the hardet to creat a new group within.
"alt" can be created by anyone at anytime. It is in a state of anarchy and
for practical reasons can not be guaranteed to be available at any particular
server. (I do not carry even half of the "alt" groups and while I allow
the system to create Big 8 groups automatically, I would never allow this
in the alt hierarchy.") And lastly, the regionals are just that. Although
mahy of them have much wider than regional distribution. I carry many
of the European regionals as we have many foreign students with interest
and they have educational value as a practice location for foreign language
study. (Also, having lived in Germany, I have a personal interest as well.)
>
> When you access your ISP's news server, you will see a list of discussion
> groups to which your news server subscribes. If you post to one of these
> groups, your message is ultimately forwarded to the news server that
> "owns" the group. From there, your message is sent out to all the other
> news servers that subscribe to the group.
Sorry, wrong. No one person or server "owns" any USENET group. Every
message posted gets forwarded from the originating server to his peers.
These peers then forward it in an ever increasing tree to further peers.
Eventually (eventually today meaning within minutes) it spreads out over
the entire USENET structure.
>
> The problem with public discussion groups is that anyone on the Internet
> can read them, and post to them. This leads to two problems (at least):
>
> 1. Spammers scan the groups and "harvest" e-mail addresses of people who
> post to them. They then send spam to these addresses.
Spammers scan everything, including your webpage looking for addresses.
Spam is not a technical problem, it is a social problem and applying
technical solutions to social problems has never worked.
>
> 2. Spammers post spam to the groups themselves.
In most groups this is a minimal problem and there are solutions to reduce
the impact even more. Most responsible News servers Spam Filter. There
are also forms of what is called retro-moderation that can be instituted if
the users of the group don't object. Because of the speed of news distribution
today, a person who reads news once or twice a day may end out seeing none
or very little of the spam, if the group get's much at all in the first place.
I take part in a number of technical discussion groups on USENET. I don't
see even 1% of the total being spam and in most groups with active discussions
going on the sheer volume can be more of a problem than spam.
>
> Clearly, we do not want a public discussion group.
One man's opinion!! Some of us who have been using both Email and News
since before the arrival of the unwashed masses have no problem with News.
> However, I believe it
> would be possible to set up a private group, if Mark were willing to host
> it on a Team.Net news server. Privacy requirements would necessitate
> setting up password access for list subscribers, who would need to access
> the newsgroup directly from the Team.Net server.
Where to begin!!! This creates a greater administrative burden on the
maintainer than a mailing list. Creates a potential for a lot of additional
traffic on the network of the hosting site. Has a single point of failure
like the mailing list idea. Does not guarantee everyone will have access.
Particularly for people who now access the mailing list through their
employers network where access to external NNTP ports may be blocked by
a corporate firewall. (I have also heard of some ISP's that do this, but
it is probably much rarer.)
bill
--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill@cs.uofs.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
|