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Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA
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In article <5982.25c6f57f@pbs.uucp>, sdroppers@pbs.uucp (Seton Droppers) writes:
> DECUServe is currently working on getting UUCP up and running.  We have a few
> minor problems with modems right now, but it looks like those problems are
> going to go away.
> 
> The VAXnotes conferences most likely will somehow be gated to some sort of
> news or mail feed.  Work is going on for that at other places.  What we will do
> with gated news is another problem.
> 
> It is likely that each individual that has a DECUServe account will be allowed
> to dial in and poll the DECUServe machine on a regular basis.  (Remember, I
> said *likely*, not *would*).
> 
> It might be possible for a DECUServe subscriber to forward vms mail from
> DECUServe back over a UUCP link.
> 
> Yes, all public material on DECUServe is "public domain", one of our cannons
> specificly requires that all postings can be freely redistributed and modified.
> 
> Time frame?  Well DECUServe is run by volunteers...
> 
> I do not think we are worried about shooting ourselves in the foot yet.  The
> big problem is not letting the notes out, but the fact each individual posting
> on DECUServe must "owned" by someone.  The other issue is the different
> environments that Notes and News have.  Notes resides in a single node, with a
> very strict topic/response structure while News is much more easy going.  You
> often get a number of responses to a subject, out of order.  Sometimes you even
> get responses before the topic...

If you could get a moderator for each conference you wanted to gateway, I
think you could solve both problems. How about a slight refinement of a
previous posting: 

Have a basically one way gateway from DECUServe to news. You lose a little
bit of the VAXnotes structuring, maybe, but only for the news side. The
newsgroup is marked as moderated, so all postings are mailed to the
moderator. 

The moderator assumes "ownership" of the posting, though the actual sender
mail address, etc would be used (maybe some standard header giving the
moderator address and indicating that he is "responsible" for it, to
whatever degree is required by the DECUServe canons). 

The moderator then does whatever reformatting is neccessary (with a program
of course), and posts the article into DECUServe directly via VAXnotes, so
that it lands in the right place in the response structure. This then flows
to the news side via the gateway.

This obviously works best if there is a way to get the message from the
moderators machine into the DECUServe VAXnotes conference directly, but I'm
not sure how that would happen. The next best alternative would be to
upload the articles to the DECUServe system (with Kermit, say) and then
enter VAXnotes and put them all in the appropriate places that way.

The ultimate would be if the gateway was smart enough to look at the
message-id's in the References: line of the followup and put it into the
appropriate reply chain, holding it back if the original article hasn't
been received (and returning it to the moderator after 3 days if the
original never arrives).

If you had such a super-smart gateway, then the moderator could simply post
the messages to news and let the gateway get them into VAXnotes
appropriately.

Granted this is all a lot of work for a moderator, but probably comparable
to the work the current moderators on usenet put in, and they seem to be
able to find people willing to do it.

> The long term?  How does DECUServe on the "Internet" sound?  No promises, but
> it is a long term project we are very interested in.

Sounds interesting, but on what software platform? Does VAXnotes speak
TCP/IP? Or do you mean once a news gateway is running, via NNTP? Or...
(Just giving you food for thought.)
-- 
Terry Poot (800)255-2762, in Kansas (913)776-4041
The McCall Pattern Company, 615 McCall Rd., Manhattan, KS 66502, USA
UUCP: rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp   Internet: tp%mccall@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu