ietf-nntp The future of NNTP

[Henk Stokhorst]

L.S.,

This is my first contribution to this list, which I have been reading
for some months now. I hope you may find the ideas worth a response.

NNTP has been proven a succesful protocol for exchanging ideas between
people. The internet as a whole has grown tremendous during the last
decade. As a result a lot of people have been trying to find ways to use
the distribution of messages over NNTP in their advantage, even if it
would be at the expense of the newsgroups community as a whole. Abuse of
the system, in my opinion has severly hampered the popularity and use of
the protocol. Huge amounts of people have turned to other protocols,
even if less suited to *exchange* information and use protocols instead
designed for *looking up* information only.

There is of course commercial spam, but also abuse by posting messages
either in quantity or trolling newsgroups etc. etc. Some newsgroups are
not affected at all, others devastated and unusable, and a lot hampered
in between.

The following proposal is designed to discourage abuse by minimizing the
effects of it and yet guarantee every person to use the system the very
way one wants to, without imposing limits.

The current working of the NNTP protocol could best be compared to a
real life messageboard. Everyone can stick up anything, the oldest
messages are removed. People decide to read messages depending on how
informative they turn out to be on average. A load of unpleasant
messages make people turn away. Instead the protocol could be changed to
a model which is alike the real life writers-editors-publishers-readers
model. Given the popularity of newpapers and magazines over unedited
newssources the model should be given a chance.

The practical implementation could be as follow: Suppose there is a
newsgroup rec.hobbyfarming.dairy which is devastated by messages that do
not relate to the public of that newsgroup. Instead of starting up a RFD
for splitting up the newsgroup in rec.hobbyfarming.dairy.unwantedgarbage
and rec.hobbyfarming.dairy.asintended one should be able to start a RFD
that calls for rec.hobbyfarming.dairy:moderatedbyme.

The semicolon would indicate that you read the newsgroup, but messages
are moderated by the editor. One could also read the newsgroup
unmoderated. The moderation is only a scheme on the newsgroup defining
which messages not to show. Like there can be more than one subgroup,
there can also be more than one moderationschemes, there
would be room for rec.hobbyfarming.dairy:moderatedbysomeoneelse. It
would only be another scheme on the same newsgroup. Moderationschemes
take up only little memory and other resources.

You could also further extend it to
rec.hobbyfarming.dairy:nospam:mystate whereas the :nospam
moderationscheme is a robot deleting spam and :mystate a
moderationscheme by a human effectively blocking all messages that do
not relate to the state where that person lives. One chooses to read
what one wants.

People who operate a newsgroup server today can choose which newsgroups
they publish, and which one not. In the new model they could also choose
which moderationschemes they use and which one not. They could use a
particular scheme to delete messages on the server if they wish to,
blocking readers to read the unmoderated flow, they could choose not to
do that.

By shifting the power from the writers to the readers, leaving everyone
the full freedom of speech (writing, expressing) I believe the
popularity of the NNTP would increase and foster exchange of information
as originally intended.

Yours on the Net,

Henk Stokhorst