🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8908281520.AA00694@sprite.crd.Ge.Com> montnaro@sprite.crd.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) writes:
   I sent this message to gnu-misc-discuss a couple of weeks ago, but
   never saw it turn up in gnu.misc.discuss, and never heard from
   anybody,

Yes, it appeared in the group, and I've had it sitting there marked as
unread all this time.  Thanks for jarring my elbow...

   I've seen many complaints about people posting to the gnu.*
   newsgroups instead of mailing to the gnu mailing lists.

That's because some people's news systems give incorrect or incomplete
addresses in From: and Reply-To:, so when the articles get gatewayed
to the mailing lists it's very hard to figure out the actual origin of
the note.

       1. Why not moderate the gnu.* newsgroups (at least officially)?
       I thought one of the features of the News software (correct me
       if I'm wrong) was that messages posted to moderated newsgroups
       were automatically mailed to the moderator. Couldn't the
       moderator's address just be the mailing list address?

Technically, perhaps an ideal solution.  Socially, not at all.
Moderated newsgroups depend upon a couple dozen Usenet "backbone"
sites maintaining a list of aliases (see Spaf's periodic "how to
construct a mailpaths file" article).  There's already one moderated
GNU group in that list, gnu.announce, and it was the first non-Usenet
group to gain such a distinction.  It would likely be socially
disadvantageous (is that a nice way to put it? :-) to impose more than
that upon the hospitality of the Usenet.  gnu.* is already accused of
enough.

       2. If 1. isn't possible, could the posting program be coerced
       to add a header field (maybe Followup-To, or X-List-Address, or
       ...) to each message that indicates the proper address to which
       postings should be mailed?

That would require the modification of lots of posting programs at
lots of sites, and would be unwieldy if not impossible.

       3. There are 17 GNU mailing list/newsgroups.

Actually, there are 20 groups now.

       Why not create a set of mailing list reflectors, all on a
       single machine, with names derived directly from the newsgroups
       (e.g. gnu.utils.bug -> gnu-utils-bug@std.address)?  The
       reflectors could simply forward all incoming mail to the real
       mailing lists.

Most of the mailing lists maintained elsewhere at least have reflector
counterparts on prep.ai.mit.edu, but they're named for the mailing
lists.  All the newsgroups have hyphens-substituted-for-dots aliases
on tut.cis.ohio-state.edu, but those go into the newsgroups and from
there out to the mailing lists.  It wouldn't be too much trouble for
someone (else) to set up aliases, named for the newsgroups, that would
feed into the mailing lists.  The problem would be that there's no
technical means to automatically coerce users to use mail and not
news.

The best general solution, with the greatest "effect leverage", would
be to persuade administrators of systems that generate non-useful
headers (bad From:, no Reply-To:) to fix their news systms.