Email vs. newsgroup

system · November 20, 1998, 8:50am

I’m an email subscriber to this list.

I was looking at the rec.sport.unicycling newsgroup last night, which I thought
was a mirror of this list, and noticed several messages that appeared recently
on there that I didn’t see in my email. The entire thread on IMPOTENCE for
example, never came thru to me.

I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem or could offer an
explanation. My email program is Eudora. Maybe it screens out impotent
messages

-Rick

system · November 20, 1998, 9:22am

RE: Email vs. newsgroup

I also read the group via email. What messages on impotence? Sounds scary.

Can any of our techies tell us why some messages go to the email and some don’t?
Do we have any control over the process?

Thanks, jf

system · November 20, 1998, 12:30pm

Re: Email vs. newsgroup

At 06:42 PM 11/20/98 +0000, Mark Wiggins wrote:
>There’s often a delay between posts on the newsgroup getting to the list.

No, this thread occured around Nov 9th, I think.

-Rick

system · November 20, 1998, 10:12am

Re: Email vs. newsgroup

Greetings

In message “RE: Email vs. newsgroup”, Foss, JohnX wrote…
>I also read the group via email. What messages on impotence? Sounds scary.

So do I, and I am concered.

>Can any of our techies tell us why some messages go to the email and some
>don’t? Do we have any control over the process?
>
>Thanks, jf
>

Regards, Jack Halpern Kanji Dictionary Publishing Society, http://www.kanji.org
Voice: +81-048-481-3103 Fax: +81-048-479-1323

system · November 20, 1998, 10:42am

Re: Email vs. newsgroup

Foss, JohnX wrote:
> Can any of our techies tell us why some messages go to the email and some
> don’t? Do we have any control over the process?

There’s often a delay between posts on the newsgroup getting to the list. Maybe
the thread’s a recent one. I think there’s also some moderating going on - to
try to catch the spam. I thought that was just some filtering set up in
Majordomo but maybe there’s some human intervention that causes the delay…

Regards, Mark.

system · November 20, 1998, 10:39pm

RE: Email vs. newsgroup

“Foss, JohnX” <johnx.foss@intel.com> writes:

> Can any of our techies tell us why some messages go to the email and
> some don’t?

It’s because unmoderated newsgroups have no central authority. Someone posts a
message to their local news server, it passes it to its neighbors, they pass it
around, and eventually it’s gotten pretty much everywhere. There’s no guarantee
that all messages will reach all servers, nor any guarantees about how long it
will take.

> Do we have any control over the process?

There’s one option that just occurred to me. I don’t know if anyone’s done this,
but it should be pretty easy to have a trivially moderated newsgroup in which
all posts are automatically and immediately approved. The advantage is that all
posts are sent directly to the moderator, so the moderator is guaranteed to see
all posts right away. If the email list mirroring system is on the same server,
then newsgroup posts will appear on the mailing list right away.

The disadvantage is that the newsgroup would have a single point at which
failure would halt the group for everyone, just as a mailing list does. Our
mailing list has been running well for years though, so I don’t know how
concerned we should be about that.

Also, people posting to the newsgroup would not see their posts right away;
they’d see them only when the post arrived from the moderator’s news server via
the usual propagation.