From: gnat@kauri.vuw.ac.nz (Nathan Torkington)
Subject: Re: nz.waffle?? (was Re: Hello....hello...is anybody home)
Organization: Contract to CSC, Victoria Uni, Wellington, New Zealand
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 01:37:39 GMT

In article <1801c88e@nacjack.gen.nz> richard@nacjack.gen.nz (Richard Vowles) writes:

> >I received bogus postings to nz.waffle from my feed site, Massey University.
> >They received it from VUW. If you knew thing one about how news systems
> >worked you might have realised that giving your pet newsgroup a name like
> >nz.waffle was likely to cause it to leak like a plastic grocery bag full of
> >nails.
>
> Quite right you are. I presumed (silly me) that if a newsgroup didn't exist
> in the .newsrc file (as there had been no Control message through creating
> it), that it wouldn't be passed around, it would have been rejected as a
> unknown newsgroup (having no known newsgroups on the Newsgroups: line to
> make it legit).

Allow me to quote from Henry Spencer on this issue:

--begin
Message-Id: <9208071519.AA20805@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 92 11:21:35 EDT
To: xxxx
Cc: nntp-managers-mailing-list
Subject: Re: cross-posting to regional newsgroups
Precedence: bulk

[...]

RFC 1036 *specifically forbids* deleting newsgroups.  There is no question
about one behavior being "more correct"; deleting is wrong, period.
The wording in 1036 derives from bad experiences with old B Newses.
Please do not try to fix this policy; it is not broken!

News propagation is far less orderly and hierarchical than many people
think.  It is common for news to "loop back", going out of the region of
distribution of a regional newgroup and then coming back in because the
propagation was a little faster that way.  The more, um, enthusiastic
NNTP sites have made this sort of thing much more likely -- not that
it was particularly rare in UUCP days -- by their mad race to get news
from one end of the Internet to the other in seconds.

There is also some concern that followups go to everyone who got the
original, lest the discussion fragment into partially-communicating
subgroups.

Deleting newsgroups is a superficially-attractive solution to the problem
of mispropagated groups and name collisions (believe me, we know all about
this, since ut.general serves both U of Toronto and U of Texas).  Simplistic
solutions like deleting newsgroups invariably cause worse problems, or
else C News would have implemented one long ago.

                                         Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                          henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
--end

He was talking about regional newsgroups with conflicting names, but
the same statement applies.  You can't rely on the machine down the
line dropping the messages - it isn't supposed to for the reasons he
gives above.

> You don't seem to realise that we don't have any 'toy rules', we don't
> have any rules whatsoever. There is no copyright on nz.* as a name, anyone
> can use it.

Oh goody - let's go make rec.comp.soc.nz.newsgroup.creation
without voting on it.  In fact, let's forge the newgrp message so that
it comes from Richard.  He can point out to the flamers that there is
no copyright on rec, comp, soc, or nz. (this is a joke, btw, for the
humour impaired).

Nat.
Newsgroups: nz.general