From: wusel@straylight.uucp (Kai 'wusel' Siering)
Newsgroups: alt.sys.amiga.uucp
Subject: Re: TrimNews for 2.04 and beyond...
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1992 19:51:02 MESZ
Organization: Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, Sietland, BRD
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In article <9209152058.AA0269y@castrov.cuc.ab.ca>, Brett Wuth writes:

% >I wish there was a way to know how many people are using AmigaUUCP. Perhaps
% >there is, anyone have any ideas?? (I'm thinking of the message-id stuff that
% >allows Geoff and Henry the ability to track C-News vs. B-News -- could something
% >similar be done for AmigaUUCP?)

% I have several neighbors running AmigaUUCP for news that never post
% anything.  Then there are the ones that don't even use news, just
% e-mail.
%
% The only way I can think of finding these sites, is to in the next
% version of AmigaUUCP add a feature that sends an "I am here" message
% to a specific site.  That site would have to be stable for (say)
% the next five years, because who nows how long people will keep
% starting to use that old address.  There should be a way to turn
% off the message for those sites that cannot reach the outside world,
% that pay for their mail, or that really want to maintain their privacy.
% The message should be sent when the package is first installed,
% whenever the node name (i.e. site or domain) changes, and a random
% time once every (say) year.  The random time could be determined
% by a hash of the node name.  Having it random would avoid swamping
% the logging site on a particular day.

     Sounds interessting;  but I don't see the neccessity to implement
such  a  complex  mechanism  - what if the operator decides after one,
two   years   not   to   send   any  more  `Ping,  I'm  still  running
AmigaUUCP'-mails? What if the anual mail gets lost due to ome mis-con-
figuration  while on it's way to the registration site? I would really
prefer adding a `sendmail -t  register@reg.site.do.main -b postmaster'
into  the  install  script  and telling about this in the README.  Who
doesn't  read the  documentation: bad luck, your caught =:-> For sites
paying for every single bit of mail, more or less the same applies ...
And  for  sites  without  a link to the real world, this doesn't hurt,
does it?

% Even with this you would miss those people that are still running
% Amiga-UUCP 1.08 and still quite happy with it.

=:->

% Might I suggest a uulib:config variable, "AutoRegister" which defaults
% to "ON".  A new file uulib:AutoRegister could contain a record of
% AutoRegisterations that have been sent for "AmigaUUCP" and other
% packages.  I see the following fields in each record (line):
[...]

     Sounds interessting,  but  I  don't  think  it's  a  good idea to
implement  something like this in the basic package ... In my opinion,
it's  up  to  the  application to handle this - and I don't think it's
worth  the  traffic  to  send  `I'm  still  running'-messages (as it's
neither  guaranteed  that  the  site  is  still alive when the message
arrives  nor  that  it  arrives  at al nor that such a message will be
sent  -  so  you  can't  say  `straylight no longer runs AmigaUUCP, it
hasn't registred since 13 months).

Only my personal opinions ... =:->
			kai

-- _
_ // Kai 'wusel' Siering, Villa Straylight, Hamburg, BRD <wusel@hactar.hanse.de>
\X/    (Heute wieder im schoenen Sietland: <hactar.hanse.de!straylight!wusel>)