🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <47e4wB4w164w@cellar.org> toad@cellar.org (Tony Shepps) writes:
>(A solid article on allowing sites to tell their feeds what they'd like
>to receive, automatically)
>
>...and I couldn't agree more.  It makes an awful lot of common sense.  But I
>have to ask: why hasn't this already happened?
>
>Is it because the folks who write and maintain most of the news freeware
>hang out at big, fully Internetted sites, and thus don't have to worry about
>ugly UUCP connections for small tight-budget sites that have to maintain
>their net status carefully?

Roughly, yes.  We used to hang out at big, fully UUCPed sites, so it's
not Internet chauvinism.  A more accurate characterization is that we
tend to hang out at sites that are major relay nodes rather than leaf
nodes.  This does mean we lack perspective on the needs of small leaf
sites that aren't responsible for passing news on to anyone else and
hence can pick and choose group-by-group.

>It would be an ironic shame if the anarchistic nature of the net created a
>situation where only the big guys could survive.  We little guys are
>fighting for our lives in the trenches.

Um, you should bear in mind that very few of the freeware authors get
paid for news work.  You too can join the illustrious ranks; all you
have to do is give up sleeping :-(.  There's a very old saying in the
freeware world:  "if you care about it so much, why don't *you* fix it?".
(The usual answer, I'm afraid, is "because it's a lot of work and just
complaining is a lot easier".)

>Every time our feed site goes away
>for days on end, I feel like running a public access site is a losing
>battle...

You don't have redundant feeds?  We certainly did, back when we were
a UUCP-only site.  (Admittedly, it was less load on the modems then.)
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry