[Info-vax] A cry for help

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-11-04 22:02, bill wrote:
> On 11/4/2023 2:40 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 11/4/2023 1:52 PM, Chris Townley wrote:
>>> On 04/11/2023 16:42, bill wrote:
>>>> Some one has to be providing Google with a feed.  The answer is to get
>>>> all of them to stop providing any kind of connection to Google.
>>>
>>> I reckon they get there own feed
>>
>> We have two parties here:
>> * X NNTP servers
>> * Google
>>
>> If *all* of the X NNTP servers stop talking to Google, then
>> the X NNTP servers will not see posts from Google and Google
>> will not see posts from the X NNTP servers.
>>
>> If only X-1 stop talking to Google, then no impact.
>>
>> Note that I am not recommending the solution. It actually happens
>> that relevant stuff get posted via Google and spam should be handled
>> by spam filter not be splitting up.
>>
> 
> I take it you have never had to admin a USENET News Server.  :-)

I certainly have...

> Chris was right.  When one wants to setup a News server one of the
> main requirements is to find peers (at least one!).  This involves
> a person to person agreement to send and receive news.  While it is
> theoretically possible to run a receive only news server there is no
> other way to inject messages into the News system without having a
> peer who is already in the system and willing to accept your posts.
> When I did this (and my time with USENET goes back to when we were
> doing it over POTS) one of the first things a peer was likely to
> require was SPAM control.  I do not understand why Google gets away
> with this crap.  I guess like everything else in the IT world there
> really are no more rules.  Welcome to anarchy.

You can have expectations of your peers, but usenet is a distributed 
system. There are peers to the peers, cross connections, and in a sense 
complete anarchy. You can *not* easily lock anyone or anything out.
And it has always been like this.

And if you've been around, you should also remember the kill wars on 
newsgroup creations that happened from time to time. Which is a very 
good example of how much of anarchy it was/is.

   Johnny