Apur-ee.196 net.news utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!davy Mon Dec 28 21:04:56 1981 More comments on USENET policies Well, I saw some intersting things suggested this evening on what could/should/would take place with the new news policies. I guess I'll make some comments: 1. Greg Ordy's idea of polls. In my mind, this is a great idea, and one that I would think fairly easy to implement. Many things could be done with this, aside from just stuff by the news "committee". For example: We have a suggestion to abolish/accept/rename/relocate newsgroup X.Y.Z. What is your opinion? [] YES [] NO [] UNDECIDED (UNINTERESTED) If it was done right, this could be a command somehow similar to "inews" (news -i for you A versioners), that sends an initial poll out to each machine (in turn, passed around all over the network). Then, the thing sits around in some directory and there's a program "pollcheck" (just like "newscheck") that out and looks for polls. Neat, huh? 2. Personally, I like the net-pers distinction, because, if nothing else, you can tell what type of stuff you're going to read right away (assuming people manage to put the stuff in the right group). One could even modify readnews to have a -P and -N flag, for "only pers" or "only net" items. 3. Somewhere I saw something about having news snarf the user's name from the password file upon submission of the article. I think this is a great idea, but I can see it being misused (or rather, "gotten around"), such as: from foo!bar!sna!fu!user In real life: user, guest account, oozer, etc. But, all in all, I think it's better than nothing. It would be nice if Berkely's Mail program did that too (ours doesn't, anyway), since it's next to impossible to figure out who is really behind "let me know" when everything is from ucbvax!unix-wizards or whatever...... Oh, well, I guess I better go slink into my corner now..... --Dave Curry (pur-ee!davy) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.