John Block said,
> Hello Neil
>> One problem is that as son as one subscriber takes a peek into
>> alt.porno.hamster they have to take a full feed of that group until it
>> is considered dormant again.
> That's a customer services issue, how quickly one can drop a newsgroup which
> is not used.
No, it's a system administration issue. Many customers only use binary
groups at the weekend, so you'd need an eight day expiry. But if the
customer using that group goes on holiday for a week, you end up
refilling the group twice.
The dnews idea is good in theory, but works poorly in practice.
> It can also cause problems for news clients
>> that use article numbers, as most do nowadays, because dropping and
>> restarting a group can mess this up.
> Hopefully people will only drop for two weeks holiday or so.
it's not people dropping, it's the server dropping and restarting the
group. DNews is actually trying to fix a problem from the wrong end.
Usenet isn't intended for binary file distribution in the way that it's
currently used.
One solution being tested in various places is to have two news servers,
one for text groups one for binary. In theory, this should enable an ISP
to provide both a fast text group feed and a complete binary group feed.
>> And it's not 100s of megs, a full news feed is over 100GB per day now,
>> with MP3s and warez using far more of that than porn. Text news, the
>> original usage, now accounts for 4% of traffic.
> When I had more time, I used to love misc.business.marketing.moderated and
> isp's used to continually drop it while the dnews request list would show
> obscure sex binaries groups active. Really unfair as my feed was less
> than one picture or, surprisingly from a groups title, noise file.
Another drawback of DNews, it uses numbers of requests, without paying
attention to bandwidth.
Neil
--
Neil Bothwick - New Media Editor, Amiga Active Magazine
Connected via Wirenet - http://www.wire.net.uk
The UK's first Amiga-only internet access provider
--
[---- Printed on recycled electrons ----]
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