[Asterisk-Users] asterisk newsgrup proposal or phpBB forum

[Joe Greco]

> On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 15:52 -0600, Joe Greco wrote:
> > > Not everyone has decent access to NNTP either due to firewalls coporate
> > > or otherwise 
> > 
> > That's why many news servers allow access on alternate ports.  :-)
> 
> On a proper network firewall, it is deny all, allow these few ports. So
> unless you are running NNTP on a port like 80 or 443, it probably will
> be blocked. Even then a good admin would have a proxy in place to help
> cut down the bandwidth usage and would therefore break NNTP.

Practical experience (bearing in mind that one of our businesses is a 
wholesale USENET outsourcer providing service to numerous ISP's) is that
if you cover 20, 23, 80, 110, 120, and 1024-3999, you have given people
the ability to bypass at LEAST 95% of all firewalls out there.

> > > or are under a quota due to the amount of illegal activity
> > > that appears there. Add to it the inability to control spam or kick an
> > > unruley users if the need arises. NNTP doesn't solve any problems, and
> > > phpBB creates a bunch.
> > > 
> > > Better question is why do you feel there needs to be a change?
> > 
> > You've missed some "best of breed" options.
> > 
> > A newsgroup by itself may or may not be useful.  However, either way, 
> > USENET (which isn't entirely limited to NNTP, incidentally) has a bunch of
> > powerful clients that are designed from the ground up for participating in
> > large threaded discussions.  This is a major failing of many mail clients.
> > I find it easier to follow large discussions with the text-based trn 
> > newsreader than with any graphical mail client I've seen to date - bar 
> > none - and trn is old technology.  Just the thread tree view itself is so
> > useful, not to mention one-key cruising through the tree nodes.
> 
> Who said mail needs to be graphical? 

Nobody.  However, I don't see too much development in the non-graphical
arena, and the threading capabilities of the text mail readers isn't all 
that great (usually zero, with less than a handful of exceptions).

> I know a great many people still
> using mutt for their mail 

You'll note my X-Mailer :-)  I'll thank you not to refer to Mutt as a
has-been...  for some of us it's the next client.

> and it probably will resemble trn close enough for your taste. 

Highly unlikely.  I've actually tried to make the jump to Mutt several
times, mostly because Elm is a has-been, but there's a substantial enough
set of annoying differences that I've always gone back.  Mutt *rocks* at
mail filtering, and in fact when I'm cleaning the inbox, I frequently pull
Mutt up and do heavy purging.

However, I've never found its threading to be all that good.  I'm used to
cruising in four directions in trn, being able to wipe out whole subtrees
at a stroke, etc...  Mutt seems much more like they tried to graft threading
on top of a conventional mail reader.

> Of course there are plenty of graphical email readers
> that support threaded views. I happen to use evolution with threads
> turned on and enjoy it.
> 
> Your right, threaded trees are great. I love it when there is enough
> people using correct enough software to help keep the information
> correct. Of course we get to the same problem here that not all software
> mail or nntp actually puts the in-reply-to or references headers in to
> make the tree view work.

Yeah, and it's not like it's *hard* to do.  Too much software written by
people who thought they were done when the program ran without crashing.

> > Many sites gateway various mailing lists into local hierarchies, for the
> > explicit purpose of solving some of the problems that "NNTP doesn't solve",
> > because the medium was designed to deal with the functional equivalent of
> > mailing list traffic from day one.
> 
> Gateway mailing lists to local hierarchies to solve problems that
> hierarchies doesn't solve?

Huh?

I said many sites gateway mailing lists into local hierarchies.  For
example, we dump the FreeBSD lists into sol.lists.freebsd.* (complete
with correct re-tagging of the Message-ID's).

> Sounds like broken hacks to me. Maybe in your
> rush through that sentence your meaning didn't get fully expressed.

I think you misparsed something.  I quoted the "NNTP doesn't solve" that
had previously been asserted.  NNTP solves lots of problems, but you kind
of have to know the ins and outs.

For example, NNTP is terrible at handling mailing list traffic if you do
not re-tag Message-ID's with a local site identifier.  Many amateurish
attempts to gateway use the original message's Message-ID, which is wrong,
because in many cases there are multiple sites gatewaying a list onto the
NNTP backbone - each with a different local hierarchy.

> As for the design, like many older technologies, NNTP was designed
> before the unrulely behavior of spammers. While I know there are some
> private nntp servers that enable authentication to protect themselves,
> it isn't the norm.  

NNTP has evolved, and the spam problem is much more under control via NNTP
than it is via e-mail these days.  We operate DSRS, a fairly unique news
abuse tracking tool, which allows abuse desks to locate their abusive
users through a variety of techniques.  One of the more pleasant things I
have noticed is that the number of account requests has dropped steadily
since the peak back around 2000...  as have the number of spam cancels
being issued against spam on USENET.

Realistically, though, for a gatewayed list, this simply isn't a problem.
Gatewayed lists are created as moderated groups, and we simply don't see
spam in our gatewayed groups, because the few porn spammers still out there
peppering USENET groups aren't smart enough to put in an Approved: header.
Were that to change, there are a number of ways to deal with it, all
technologies developed years ago thanks to the motivation of lusers like
HipCrime.

> > You can avoid some of the problems of public newsgroups by making it a one-
> > way gateway, with moderator pointing back at the original list, therefore
> > subject to all the normal list posting controls.
> 
> And a limit on what a moderator will be able to handle unless it is a
> program, and then it wouldn't take a moment to get past it. Not that
> email is any more secure.

Really?  There are actually numerous robomoderation packages for USENET that
have been highly successful at handling their duties.

> > Setting up a one-way gateway isn't too difficult.  Is there interest?  I
> > can certainly start one.  We already do all the FreeBSD lists and a bunch
> > of other stuff here.
> 
> I belive there has already been one with URL posted in this thread.

gmane isn't a gateway.  It's a local news server, which means you actually
need to connect to their server, rather than just asking your local admin
to add the proper groups.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.