🚀 go-pugleaf

I have run news.msfc.nasa.gov since October 1993.  Late last year,
management decided to outsource news at MSFC, and this has recently borne
fruit.  As a result, on Friday, August 4, 2000, I will shut down my news
server, and news.msfc.nasa.gov will be an outsourced host that I have
nothing to do with.

Since November 1996, I have run a Make Money Fast chain letter cancelbot
and NoCeM generator on news.msfc.nasa.gov.  This cancelbot automatically
emails the senders of MMF, where possible, and tries to educate them.  I
consider this program to be successful, because MMF has generally
decreased from about 50,000 per month to about 13,000.  This is not a
huge decrease, but it is significant, because the total number of
articles posted has increased over the same period of time.  During the
April 1998 cancel moratorium, there were about 200,000 MMFs posted, but
this was an unusual case.  I have not been able to migrate the cancelbot
to another platform because of my workload this year.  Therefore, the
cancelbot and its associated activity will cease on August 4.  I believe
that the usual spam cancelers will be effective in canceling multiposted
MMF, but there will be little or no automatic notification.  If I succeed
in moving the cancelbot elsewhere, I will use a different PGP key to sign
the NoCeMs than the one I currently use.

After August 4, the addresses news@msfc.nasa.gov, usenet@msfc.nasa.gov,
usenet.news@msfc.nasa.gov, news@news.msfc.nasa.gov, and so on will not
reliably deliver to me.  I don't know who they will deliver to.  Anyone
who uses these addresses after August 4 probably isn't me.  If you want
to reach me, J. Porter Clark, try either porter.clark@msfc.nasa.gov
(work) or jpc@suespammers.org (everything else).

I plan to continue to moderate four low-traffic regional newsgroups:

  alabama.announce
  alabama.birmingham.jobs
  alabama.jobs
  hsv.jobs

but I will do so from a different platform.  (If your news service
provider doesn't have these newsgroups marked as moderated, please bug
them about it.  The usual isc.org moderation addresses work for these
newsgroups.)

I also plan to continue to be the authorized newgrouper for alabama.* and
hsv.*.  The PGP key will stay the same for this activity, but I will
issue newgroups and rmgroups from some other machine and email address.
There aren't likely to be any new newsgroups in these hierarchies in the
next few months, anyway.

I have enjoyed newsadmin work.  It was something that I was not supposed
to have to do for more than about two months.  I have never made a living
out of being a newsadmin; see my ugly web pages at
http://personal.vallnet.com/jpc/ if you want to see what my regular job
is like (at best).  Obviously, I couldn't make a living as a web page
designer, either.  8-)

-- 
J. Porter Clark, d/b/a
+--+
|oo| The Unknown News Administrator
|  | news@msfc.nasa.gov
`^^'