[Pan-users] Re: posting server according to the group one?

[Duncan]

Matej Cepl <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 25 May 2009 15:28:56
+0000:

> Duncan, Mon, 25 May 2009 10:32:59 +0000:
>> Special purpose or private servers such as gmane and grc just happen to
>> be using the same NNTP protocol as normal USENET[.]  Being the only
> servers that carry those "groups" is one way they don't fit that mold.
> 
> OK, I take that grc.com or gmane.org are exceptions to the general
> Usenet world ... I would venture that (at least among computer afflicted
> people) they are becoming quite much more common than the big Usenet,
> but that's disputable and no-one has any data, so I shut up on that.

For text-only, /possibly/ but it'd surprise me.  But even there I'd say 
the MS groups on the MS servers are likely to be more common, and I 
believe the binary groups are the most commonly used in any case, for 
pr0n, music, TV programs (some foreign), movies (anime!), or warez.  
There's a LOT of news users into one or the other of those, plus the few 
that have a few pre-selected groups (animals, transformers, whatever)
setup for their kids and the few that do "safer" groups such as wallpaper.

AFAIK the largest most active group remains chello.binaries...

>> Meanwhile, if you can come up with a better and/or more intuitive idea
>> for setting the posting server[...]
> 
> OK, at least there is a workaround, but I think that conceptually this
> design is wrong ... I think you are mixing two things together:
> 
> a) identity for posting ... yes, of course, I understand need for double
> identity, but then it should be really identity,

Real identity?  You lost me at that point.

> b) servers for posting ... you actually don't care about servers
> (meaning, like real piece of hardware with separate IP address), but
> something which my IRC client (xchat-gnome) would call "network". So, I
> would have three networks defined:
> 1) gmane with one server news.gmane.org
> 2) grc with one server news.grc.com
> 3) usenet with (currently, but it may change anytime) news.felk.cvut.cz,
> which is for "the real Usenet" (whatever it is).

I don't really like the analogy but OK...

> The point is that separate network doesn't have to correspond to the
> real piece of hardware and in the ideal case you could change servers
> without disrupting organization of your messages.

Except that normally, each server has its own per-group sequence 
numbering, even if they carry the same groups.  Thus, unless special 
arrangements have been made (as at my ISP for years, east central and 
west servers all centrally numbered), change servers and with most 
clients (the ones that track status by message-id being an exception), 
while the messages and headers /may/ still be there, you lose read-
message tracking, and generally either find all messages appearing as new 
and unread (the server has higher sequence numbers) or you get no new 
ones (the server has lower sequence numbers than the client is tracking, 
so the client thinks it has seen everything).


> If these two things were separated, I would have one identity for all of
> these (my marriage is satisfying to me so I don't deal with porn, and I
> really don't want to get into copyright infrigment stuff), and three
> networks.
> 
> What do you think?

Well, just have one profile, copied three times, with a different server 
selected for each.  That's not too difficult, particularly if you're 
using an external sig (file or executable generator) and don't have 
custom headers.

But the point is, if a group shows up on more than one server/network, as 
must be assumed for "real" USENET, then no matter how you handled it, 
you'd still have the problem, that being that the posting server would 
need selected per group as Murphy's law is plain enough that the default 
one would NOT be the preferred one. =:^(

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman