ietf-nntp Initial draft FINALLY available

[Thomas 'Mike' Michlmayr]

On Oct 2, magill at isc.upenn.edu (William H. Magill) wrote:
> I believe that the general concensus of folks at the INN tutorial here  at
> LISA this week is that "sucking feeds" are a bad thing.

while i'm not exactly thrilled by the current implementations of "sucking 
feeds" (the really suck ;-), i don't think that the idea is a bad thing.

> For one thing, most "sucking feeds" are not legit feeds in the first place,
> but rather people running readers, or pretending to be runing readers,
> which are in fact servers. 

true.

> Usually, at least in my experience, "sucking
> feeds" are created by people who really have no idea what they are doing or
> how to do things the "correct" way - ie by signing up to receive a feed.

now, this might work in the US, but in europe the telephone-costs are too
high for such things. many people use sucking feeds as a substitute for an
offline reader, connecting once or twice a day and downloading the newsgroups
they are interested in for later local reading. this is the only reasonable 
way beside UUCP (which most providers in .at don't offer) to get access to 
newsgroups (if you pay 4 US$/hour for a local phonecall, you think twice
about connecting).

now there might be other ways to do this (a feed which makes compressed
batches that can be downloaded via ftp or something along that line), but
most of these require the cooperation of the ISP (which refused to install
UUCP before, so you're most likely out of luck).

> The bigest reason that sucking feeds are a bad thing for servers is that it
> prevents the server operator from utilizing the little bit of control
> capabilities which exist in the feeding side of news.

on the other hand, an admin does have some control capabilites over the
reading side of news just as well.

> People who are running sucking feeds tend to believe that they have a right
> to news right now, even though their actions are in direct conflict with
> the desires and demands of others.

of course, but this is mostly a problem of educating users.

> Until there are some major changes in the news database strcture, NEWNEWS
> as an optional command is a tolerable evil, preferrably something which can
> be commented out.

agreed. perhaps discouraging NEWNEWS will teach the implementors of "sucking
programs" a lesson to teach their programs to behave properly.

-- 
Thomas 'Mike' Michlmayr can not assert the truth of all statements in 
this article and still be consistent. <mike at cosy.sbg.ac.at>