Ostracism Code For News, Mail Wanted
Steve C. Simmons
A recent poster (no names) has finally gone too far. As Systems Manager
here I could write a complaint to the sysadm of the computer from which
the posting was made, but history leads me to believe that the account
could not be removed nor network access restricted. Complaining is good
for the soul but ineffective.
USENET is an anarchy. The only tool I can see to deal with the unruly
is exclusion. Therefore:
I am looking for ostracism code. This should be a set of patches to
news 2.11.14 which would silently bitbucket all postings from <user@site>,
and a set of patches to smail/sendmail/ucbmail/lmail which would
refuse sending of mail to <user@site> with an explanatory message,
and silently bitbucket all mail to *or through* us from <user@site>.
An ostracism. If nobody's got the code, I'll do it myself. It ain't
gonna be very hard. Yes, I'll post.
--
Steve Simmons ...!umix!itivax!scs
Industrial Technology Institute, Ann Arbor, MI.
"You can't get here from here."
Steve C. Simmons
>I am looking for ostracism code. This should be a set of patches to
>news 2.11.14 which would silently bitbucket all postings from <user@site>,
>and a set of patches to smail/sendmail/ucbmail/lmail which would
>refuse sending of mail to <user@site> with an explanatory message,
>and silently bitbucket all mail to *or through* us from <user@site>.
Several folks have sent some well-reasoned comments boiling down to
"do what you like with your own site, but don't disrupt mail/news".
Good points, all. OK, mail thru and news thru will remain unaffected.
It's just gonna be the equivalent of a global kill file.
Der Tynan
>
> I am looking for ostracism code. This should be a set of patches to
> news 2.11.14 which would silently bitbucket all postings from <user@site>,
> and a set of patches to smail/sendmail/ucbmail/lmail which would
> refuse sending of mail to <user@site> with an explanatory message,
> and silently bitbucket all mail to *or through* us from <user@site>.
>
> Steve Simmons ...!umix!itivax!scs
In a word, this is censorship. You are certainly within your rights to delete
mail passing through your site, but it's not exactly polite behavior. I can
understand your wanting to eliminate mail/news from this <user@site>, but
blocking his mail THROUGH your system is NOT the way to go. What would you do
if people started blocking your mail, because you were a Democrat/Republican
(delete where applicable). Besides the obvious question of bandwidth, I can't
see why you'd want to block his/her mail passing through your system. In
effect, you're saying that YOU don't agree with the opinions of HIM/HER, and
as such, refuse to allow OTHER people to come to their own conclusions. You
could very easily start a "blocking war", making the maps look like spaghetti.
And for what? Because YOU don't know how to use the KILL feature in 'rn'.
- Der
BTW;
cross-posting to 99 newsgroups doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get a wider
audience.
--
dty...@Tynan.COM (Dermot Tynan @ Tynan Computers)
{apple,mips,pyramid,uunet}!zorba.Tynan.COM!dtynan
--- God invented alcohol to keep the Irish from taking over the planet ---