Post by Sn!pePost by Adam H. KermanPost by Sn!pe. . .
I've just checked the current newsgroups file at ISC.
Ray's incantation (as above):-
free.chicken Foghorn Leghorn would like a home.
free.chicken You may waive some dead poultry here (Moderated)
It was the Moderated status of the pre-existing entry that interested
me but it seems to have been swept away by Ray's newgrouping.
Is it normal that existing entries can simply be overwritten?
It doesn't work like that, sorry. No server that created it as moderator
is likely to change the moderation flag. Unapproved articles won't
propagate to servers that created the moderated group.
However, to the extent that free.* had rules, moderated newsgroups
weren't suppposed to have been newgrouped in the first place.
OK, I can see that but I don't properly understand; could you please
point to further reading?
This is my (hopefully) informed opinion based on decades of commenting
in configging discussions. As we've told myriad proponents since Day 1,
newgroup messages don't create newsgroups.
A News administrator like Ray creates a newsgroup.
In unadministered hierarchies like alt.* and free.*, the vast majority
of News administrators created groups upon user request and not
automatically thanks to frequent DOS attacks with overwhelming numbers
of control messages, especially newgroup messages in alt.*. There were
similar attacks in administered hierarchies like the Big 8 which is why
PGP-signed control messages became a thing.
But there's no such thing as a signed control message in an
unadministered hierarchy.
free.* was started some time after alt.* because "alt.* has too many
rules." It never went anywhere.
Then, I think around 1999, skirv entered into negotiations with
Hipcrime, the technical troll active around that time, to stop
committing abuse if free.* were restarted. skirv wrote an FAQ (still
posted on a cron job) announcing that free.* wasn't subject to spam
cancels (based on skirv's earlier spam thresholds FAQ) and wasn't going
to have moderated groups.
skirv was... naive. It didn't end the DOS attacks, especially via the
open proxies that Bell Canada refused to fix. Hipcrime eventually
stopped trolling himself and began committing abuse via Hipclones, other
technical trolls who simply used his software to abuse Usenet.
In the case of free.chicken, someone on a server in which the moderation
flag is set is going to have to request that it be unset. It's just
going to happen.
I don't think you are allowed to post a self-approved article in an
unmoderated group, so articles may propogate to servers in which it
remains a moderated group.
Note that Hipcrime's antics are the reason that Ray uses a two-server
model, a transit server exposed to Usenet and a reader server that his
users read and post from.