• Newsgroup changes (2020-12-20 to 2020-12-27)

    From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Newsgroup Changes Report on Sun Dec 27 17:10:18 2020
    Newsgroup Changes Report <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Over the past week, the following changes have been made to the list of >Usenet newsgroups maintained at <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/>.
    This list is maintained via automatic processing of control messages as >explained by the files in that directory. For more information, see the
    end of this message. . . .

    I didn't know this report was posted regularly.

    Even in free.* and alt.*, newgroup messages are sent rarely and they
    almost never include the For your newsgroups file line. There is no
    reason to exclude them unless they exceed some threshold you could set.
    I wouldn't bother using the fact of those newgroup messages to trigger
    the processing and posting of this report, but include them since the
    last one of these was generated for posting to Usenet.

    I seriously question why automatically generated lists should ever be crossposted out of news.admin.lists. Other newsgroups should be used for discussion, not the lists themselves. I've always objected to
    automatically generating postings as an attempt to show there is
    activity in an extremely low volume group, with the exception of *.lists
    and *.faq groups intended for lists, only. Since most of the cron jobs
    posting automated lists to Usenet have died, I for one haven't missed
    them.

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  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sun Dec 27 10:11:03 2020
    "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> writes:

    I didn't know this report was posted regularly.

    Given that it's been posted if warranted every week since, I believe, 2004
    (at least that's when I wrote the original posting template), that's
    mildly amusing, although understandable given that the traffic of group
    changes has dropped off a lot.

    Even in free.* and alt.*, newgroup messages are sent rarely and they
    almost never include the For your newsgroups file line. There is no
    reason to exclude them unless they exceed some threshold you could set.

    Nonetheless, I'm the one generating the report, and I don't want to
    include them. Including unmanaged hierarchies is an open invitation to
    someone playing silly games with the automated report, and I don't want to
    have to deal with it. As mentioned in the report, anyone else is free to generate their own report from the source data if they want.

    I seriously question why automatically generated lists should ever be crossposted out of news.admin.lists. Other newsgroups should be used
    for discussion, not the lists themselves.

    The report is posted only to news.admin.lists. Followups are set to news.admin.hierarchies because news.admin.lists is not a discussion group.
    So the whole thing appears to work exactly the way that you want it to
    work, and I'm not sure why you're upset.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Sun Dec 27 19:19:39 2020
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
    "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> writes:

    I didn't know this report was posted regularly.

    Given that it's been posted if warranted every week since, I believe, 2004 >(at least that's when I wrote the original posting template), that's
    mildly amusing, although understandable given that the traffic of group >changes has dropped off a lot.

    I haven't seen one of these in months. I'd always assumed that a change
    from a hierarchy administrator triggered generation of the report and
    that it's not posted in weeks without change.

    Even in free.* and alt.*, newgroup messages are sent rarely and they
    almost never include the For your newsgroups file line. There is no
    reason to exclude them unless they exceed some threshold you could set.

    Nonetheless, I'm the one generating the report, and I don't want to
    include them. Including unmanaged hierarchies is an open invitation to >someone playing silly games with the automated report, and I don't want to >have to deal with it. As mentioned in the report, anyone else is free to >generate their own report from the source data if they want.

    Very well.

    I seriously question why automatically generated lists should ever be >>crossposted out of news.admin.lists. Other newsgroups should be used
    for discussion, not the lists themselves.

    The report is posted only to news.admin.lists. Followups are set to >news.admin.hierarchies because news.admin.lists is not a discussion group.
    So the whole thing appears to work exactly the way that you want it to
    work, and I'm not sure why you're upset.

    I apologize.

    For whatever reason, I thought I was reading it in news.admin.hierarchies,
    but now that I look again, no the list was not crossposted.

    Withdrawn

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Sun Dec 27 11:21:30 2020
    "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> writes:

    I haven't seen one of these in months. I'd always assumed that a change
    from a hierarchy administrator triggered generation of the report and
    that it's not posted in weeks without change.

    Well, that part is indeed true. It's not posted unless there are changes,
    so it's gotten increasingly rare over time. It was posted nearly weekly
    back in the day.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Thomas Hochstein@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Fri Jan 8 16:10:09 2021
    Adam H. Kerman schrieb:

    I haven't seen one of these in months. I'd always assumed that a change
    from a hierarchy administrator triggered generation of the report and
    that it's not posted in weeks without change.

    That's true. There just aren't that many hierarchy administrators
    left, and where there are ones, the hierarchies don't change much.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)