Will your replacement set up a facebook or google-plus relay then? I thought about this already for quite some time after I've seen the successful migration of both tech-savy and novice users to web 2.0 services. There is just no way to argue against finally making it possible to fully exploit our modern touch-interfaces that also make it so trivial to include scrolling media rich content, images, videos without the typical mimecode problems.
On 7/15/13, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > The comp.os.plan9 Usenet Newsgroup is a moderated Newsgroup. > Articles require approval before being posted. It has been > moderated from here, the University of Bath, since the 1990's. I, > the current moderator, will be leaving the University at the end of > this month and our Usenet server will be turned off in late August > of this year. So a new moderator for comp.os.plan9 is required. > > Newsgroup articles are also sent to the 9fans mailing list. > Messages sent to the 9fans mailing list are auto-injected into the > comp.os.plan9 Usenet Newsgroup. This bi-directional gateway will > disappear when our Usenet server is turned off. So a volunteer to > take over this service is also required. > > Further details of the above are given below. > > Moderating the Newsgroup isn't labour-intensive. For example I've > approved and posted some 18 articles in the last three months. The > vast majority of these articles have arrived via Google Groups. > > The moderator will need access to a Usenet system and have the right > to post articles to a moderated Newsgroup. I.e. articles from the > moderator which include an Approved: header are accepted. Volunteer > moderators are requested. > > I suspect the reason that moderating the Newsgroup isn't arduous is > that the majority of the articles in the comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup are > gatewayed in from the 9fans mailing list at: > > http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/mailing_lists/ > > and most serious plan9 adherents are members of this mailing list. > > Currently our Usenet server acts as a bi-directional gateway. > The articles from the 9fans mailing list are injected into the > comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup and articles approved for the Newsgroup are > sent on to the mailing list. > > Gatewaying the 9fans mailing list into the Newsgroup will obviously > keep running until our Usenet server is switched off, but a > replacement elsewhere is ideally required. > > The minimum requirement for gatewaying mailing list articles into > the Newsgroup is to be subscribed to the 9fans mailing list and > have access to a Usenet system with the right to post articles to a > moderated Newsgroup. > > Manually injecting 9fans mailing list articles into the Newsgroup > is labour-intensive. It needs to be automated. There are probably > several ways of doing this, but we've set this up directly on our > Usenet server. Our setup is similar to the following. > > We use the mail domain mail2news.bath.ac.uk for mailing lists we > wish to inject into Newsgroups. Mail for this domain is handled by > the Usenet server, which is running exim as its MTA and INN as its > Usenet software. All incoming email is checked for viruses using > ClamAV. > > An address in the mail2news.bath.ac.uk domain is subscribed to the > 9fans mailing list. Email arriving for this address is checked to > see it has the correct envelope sender ([email protected]). > If so, the INN program "mailpost" is used to inject the message > into the Newsgroup. The "mailpost" program keeps a record of the > Message-ID's it has seen. So there's no problem with looping, ie > the attempted injection of the same message a repeated number of > times. > > Newsgroup articles could be injected into the mailing list by using > INN "news2mail" channel script. However, betraying my original > Cnews roots, this is done by a shell script driven by the fragment: > > # Inject articles posted to the comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup back into > # the mailing list, [email protected], using a locally written script. > # The script should include safeguards against looping, ie not > # re-injecting articles that originally came from the mailing list. > plan9mail!\ > :comp.os.plan9\ > :Tp:/opt/news/bin/plan9mail %s > > in INN's newsfeeds file. > > The above script uses the news2mail program from the antique but > usable newsgate.tar.Z package to send email. The anti-looping > checks include ensuring the Newsgroup article doesn't include a > header of the form: > > X-BeenThere: [email protected] > > which indicates this was a 9fans mailing list article injected into > Newsgroup. > > The above may sound complex, but it's fairly maintenance free once > set up. We clearly won't be able to continue with this service once > our Usenet server is decommissioned. A volunteer to set up and run > a similar service is required. > -- > Dennis Davis, BUCS, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK > [email protected] Phone: +44 1225 386101 > >
