indexing service (was Re: Stupid reposting service)

[Kyle Jones]

T. William Wells writes per-user nuking of the source reposting:
 > If you use rn, you might try using a kill file. Those postings
 > have headers which should be easy enough to filter out. Or, if
 > not, I'm sure Ed could arrange that it be so.

Tom Neff writes:
 > It's worth pointing out in all contexts -- but especially in the
 > realm of large source postings -- that news articles don't arrive at
 > sites cost free, KILL files notwithstanding. [...] RE-posted sources
 > from some individual newsreader's site forces people to bear the cost
 > of two distributions [...]
 > 
 > So while it's important to know about KILL files, they don't
 > fully replace proper posting to begin with.

The trick of course is to get proper postings.  The recent and not so
recent history of alt.sources has aptly demonstrated how difficult such
postings are to come by.

On the other hand, the charter of alt.sources.index can be easily
extended to allow for indices to other newsgroups.  Someone could decide
that they would keep track of source postings in, say, comp.emacs and
make a weekly alt.sources.index posting that looked something like:

Newsgroups: alt.sources.index
From: elves at magic-tree.keebler.com (Those Keebler Elves)
Newsgroups-Indexed: comp.emacs
Subject: comp.emacs index for the week ending 16 December 1989

... and so forth, and list the message-IDs in the body of the message.
I can't imagine anyone watching ALL the newsgroups, but comp.emacs gets
enough source postings that it would be worthwhile to cover.

kyle jones   <kjones at talos.uu.net>   ...!uunet!talos!kjones