Re: [9fans] Moderator's Note: comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup.

[Skip Tavakkolian <skip.tavakkolian@gmail.com>]

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the nature of any large, all encompassing thing is to be good and evil all
at the same time. proof: imagine a company (Google, Microsoft, Oracle, GE,
etc.) that spans the universe. your perception of whether that thing is
mostly good or mostly evil is a reflection of your belief about the nature
of the universe.



On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:03 PM, john francis lee <jfl@robinlea.com> wrote:

> Isn't google the now well-known devil itself ?
>
>
> On 07/15/2013 11:04 PM, hiro wrote:
>
>> Will your replacement set up a facebook or google-plus relay then?
>> I thought about this already for quite some time after I've seen the
>> successful migration of both tech-savy and novice users to web 2.0
>> services. There is just no way to argue against finally making it
>> possible to fully exploit our modern touch-interfaces that also make
>> it so trivial to include scrolling media rich content, images, videos
>> without the typical mimecode problems.
>>
>> On 7/15/13, 9fans@mail2news.bath.ac.uk <9fans@mail2news.bath.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The comp.os.plan9 Usenet Newsgroup is a moderated Newsgroup.
>>> Articles require approval before being posted.  It has been
>>> moderated from here, the University of Bath, since the 1990's.  I,
>>> the current moderator, will be leaving the University at the end of
>>> this month and our Usenet server will be turned off in late August
>>> of this year.  So a new moderator for comp.os.plan9 is required.
>>>
>>> Newsgroup articles are also sent to the 9fans mailing list.
>>> Messages sent to the 9fans mailing list are auto-injected into the
>>> comp.os.plan9 Usenet Newsgroup.  This bi-directional gateway will
>>> disappear when our Usenet server is turned off.  So a volunteer to
>>> take over this service is also required.
>>>
>>> Further details of the above are given below.
>>>
>>> Moderating the Newsgroup isn't labour-intensive.  For example I've
>>> approved and posted some 18 articles in the last three months.  The
>>> vast majority of these articles have arrived via Google Groups.
>>>
>>> The moderator will need access to a Usenet system and have the right
>>> to post articles to a moderated Newsgroup.  I.e. articles from the
>>> moderator which include an Approved: header are accepted.  Volunteer
>>> moderators are requested.
>>>
>>> I suspect the reason that moderating the Newsgroup isn't arduous is
>>> that the majority of the articles in the comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup are
>>> gatewayed in from the 9fans mailing list at:
>>>
>>> http://plan9.bell-labs.com/**wiki/plan9/mailing_lists/<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/mailing_lists/>
>>>
>>> and most serious plan9 adherents are members of this mailing list.
>>>
>>> Currently our Usenet server acts as a bi-directional gateway.
>>> The articles from the 9fans mailing list are injected into the
>>> comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup and articles approved for the Newsgroup are
>>> sent on to the mailing list.
>>>
>>> Gatewaying the 9fans mailing list into the Newsgroup will obviously
>>> keep running until our Usenet server is switched off, but a
>>> replacement elsewhere is ideally required.
>>>
>>> The minimum requirement for gatewaying mailing list articles into
>>> the Newsgroup is to be subscribed to the 9fans mailing list and
>>> have access to a Usenet system with the right to post articles to a
>>> moderated Newsgroup.
>>>
>>> Manually injecting 9fans mailing list articles into the Newsgroup
>>> is labour-intensive.  It needs to be automated.  There are probably
>>> several ways of doing this, but we've set this up directly on our
>>> Usenet server.  Our setup is similar to the following.
>>>
>>> We use the mail domain mail2news.bath.ac.uk for mailing lists we
>>> wish to inject into Newsgroups.  Mail for this domain is handled by
>>> the Usenet server, which is running exim as its MTA and INN as its
>>> Usenet software.  All incoming email is checked for viruses using
>>> ClamAV.
>>>
>>> An address in the mail2news.bath.ac.uk domain is subscribed to the
>>> 9fans mailing list.  Email arriving for this address is checked to
>>> see it has the correct envelope sender (9fans-bounces@9fans.net).
>>> If so, the INN program "mailpost" is used to inject the message
>>> into the Newsgroup.  The "mailpost" program keeps a record of the
>>> Message-ID's it has seen.  So there's no problem with looping, ie
>>> the attempted injection of the same message a repeated number of
>>> times.
>>>
>>> Newsgroup articles could be injected into the mailing list by using
>>> INN "news2mail" channel script.  However, betraying my original
>>> Cnews roots, this is done by a shell script driven by the fragment:
>>>
>>> # Inject articles posted to the comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup back into
>>> # the mailing list, 9fans@9fans.net, using a locally written script.
>>> # The script should include safeguards against looping, ie not
>>> # re-injecting articles that originally came from the mailing list.
>>> plan9mail!\
>>>    :comp.os.plan9\
>>>    :Tp:/opt/news/bin/plan9mail %s
>>>
>>> in INN's newsfeeds file.
>>>
>>> The above script uses the news2mail program from the antique but
>>> usable newsgate.tar.Z package to send email.  The anti-looping
>>> checks include ensuring the Newsgroup article doesn't include a
>>> header of the form:
>>>
>>> X-BeenThere: 9fans@9fans.net
>>>
>>> which indicates this was a 9fans mailing list article injected into
>>> Newsgroup.
>>>
>>> The above may sound complex, but it's fairly maintenance free once
>>> set up.  We clearly won't be able to continue with this service once
>>> our Usenet server is decommissioned.  A volunteer to set up and run
>>> a similar service is required.
>>> --
>>> Dennis Davis, BUCS, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
>>> D.H.Davis@bath.ac.uk               Phone: +44 1225 386101
>>>
>>>
>>>
> --
> john francis lee
> 246/3 Moo 22
> Thanon Kaew Wai
> Mueang Chiangrai 57000
> Thailand
>
>
>

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