Crossposting to moderated/unmoderated groups

[Broadway's Streetsweeper]

While trying to followup an article posted to two ordinary groups (net.emacs
and net.unix-wizards) I added a moderated group (mod.computers.sun) to the
Newsgroups: line. When Pnews tried to post this, it mailed the article to the
moderator of sun-spots, and then (apparently) tried to post (via inews) to all
three newsgroups. All seemed to go well, but a minute later, I received mail
from inews on our news server that I was trying to post to a moderated group,
and should send mail instead. (We are running rrn with the nntp fake inews).
The article was not posted at all, even to the unmoderated groups, and nothing
was saved in dead.article.

So where is the bug? Pnews should probably strip moderated groups from the
Newsgroups: header line as it recognizes them, before posting with inews.
But inews should really do better than just drop the article on the floor.
Reforming the Newsgroups: line in inews would be a far better thing to do. If
it does decide to reject the article (say it is only posted to one moderated
group) it should save a copy in dead article, rather than mailing me back the
offending headers (sans article body).

The real problem here is the split in methods used to post to different types
of newgroups. If we want to encourage the growth in moderated groups, we
should make it just as easy to post to them as it is to post to normal groups.
Why can't inews just fork up /bin/mail and send a copy of the article to the
moderator, as listed in /usr/lib/news/moderators? That way, users need only
learn one method of posting news, even if they aren't fortunate enough to have
rn, and the interface for all newsreading/posting programs becomes easier.

@alex (waiting for the article to appear in sun-spots)
arpa: du...@columbia.edu
uucp: ...!seismo!columbia!dupuy