Afloyd.9 net.news utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:mhtsa!ihnss!npois!harpo!floyd!trb Wed Dec 23 09:30:52 1981 How Can We Force Access-by-Exact-Name Newsgroups? I figured net.jokes.q would be a nice way to keep questionable jokes out of the way of people of good moral fiber. It isn't exactly working in a general way. How about q.all newsgroups? I'm not just suggesting this to encourage folks to put more and different kinds of questionable stuff on the net... Maybe netnews could be fixed so that you would have to specify a root name in order to get the newsgroup, "all" and "all.all" would be meaningless, you'd have to say "net.all," "fa.all," etc. That way people would have to ASK for q.* to get questionable newsgroups. I think net.jokes.q is worthwhile. Though I don't enjoy every entry, I have enjoyed many of them. If there is a problem with questionable humor, it lies in the sentiments themselves, not in the transmission of them over the net (which is a pretty inert activity in itself). Back to Access-by-Exact-Name newsgroups... I know that many of us enjoy the luxury of subscribing to all. By disallowing "all" in the first field, you are not really missing new newsgroups unless they are radically different, new newsgroups should be reported in net.general (how about net.new-ng?). You can still subscribe to net.all, etc. Whaddya say? Andy Tannenbaum BTL Whippany, NJ ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.