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  • Re: Newsgroup changes (2026-01-25 to 2026-02-01)

    From Adam H. Kerman@ahk@chinet.com to news.admin.hierarchies on Sun Feb 1 15:31:32 2026
    From Newsgroup: news.admin.hierarchies

    Newsgroup Changes Report <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Over the past week, the following changes have been made to the list of >Usenet newsgroups maintained at <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/>.
    This list is maintained via automatic processing of control messages as >explained by the files in that directory. For more information, see the
    end of this message. . . .

    "Managed" in the above means that changes to alt.* and free.* are >specifically excluded from this report (but included in the maintained >newsgroup lists) because there is too much churn in those hierarchies and
    too much noise in the report. Similar unmanaged hierarchies may be
    excluded in the future, should they cause similar problems. This report
    will not be modified to include alt.* and free.*, but anyone else who
    wishes could produce a more inclusive report from the log files in:

    Russ, given long-standing changes in Usenet, the "churn" statement
    hasn't been applicable in a very long time. I do recall Hipcrime's DOS
    attacks that sometimes included newgroup messages in alt. We used to
    have users who, just having learned to send newgroup messages, sent up
    to a dozen or so with their ideas for topics to discuss that simply
    needed their own narrowly-focused froups. They had no interest in
    promoting any of them, got bored, and stopped doing it.

    I recall no instance of excessive numbers of newgroup messages in free.

    There is no technical reason, no abuse reason, nor is there a social
    reason to exclude alt and free newgroups from this report. However, I
    would make the need to follow your syntax recommendations with respect
    to the For your newsgroups file line a sanity check for the purpose of
    being listed on this report in a control message that is also not
    nonstandard.
    --- Synchronet 3.21b-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Adam H. Kerman@ahk@chinet.com to news.admin.hierarchies on Sun Feb 1 22:14:30 2026
    From Newsgroup: news.admin.hierarchies

    Thomas Hochstein <thh@thh.name> wrote:
    Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    There is no technical reason, no abuse reason, nor is there a social
    reason to exclude alt and free newgroups from this report.

    | This report
    | will not be modified to include alt.* and free.*, but anyone else who
    | wishes could produce a more inclusive report [...]

    Yes. That boilerplate has been in the report for several decades. My
    request stands as the reason for the exclusion no longer exists.
    --- Synchronet 3.21b-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Russ Allbery@eagle@eyrie.org to news.admin.hierarchies on Sun Feb 1 21:27:41 2026
    From Newsgroup: news.admin.hierarchies

    "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> writes:

    There is no technical reason, no abuse reason, nor is there a social
    reason to exclude alt and free newgroups from this report.

    I personally will never under any circumstances include alt.* or free.* in
    my report. The next time I get a chance (which I know I've been saying for years now), I'll be dropping any input to the report that isn't PGP-signed
    by some known hierarchy administrator. (In practice, that's mostly already
    the case.)

    The explanation in the report is not a complete explanation (I'm also not interested in publishing anything that allows random people on the
    Internet to insert things into it), but free.* does continue to get a lot
    more newgroups than all the managed hierarchies put together. The volume
    of *everything* has just gone down a lot.
    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
    --- Synchronet 3.21b-Linux NewsLink 1.2