[Coco] Re: A return to bit.listserv.coco?

[John E. Malmberg]

Lets clear up some items of confusion.

Currently the newsgroup bit.listserv.coco is under the control of 
Princeton.edu even if they are not actively doing anything with it.

The official charter of the bit.listserv.coco newsgroup is to be a 
newsgroup mirror of the coco mailing list that is currently hosted by 
Princeton.edu.

The bit.listserv.* newsgroups are specifically designated to be gateways 
or mirrors to mailing lists hosted by bitnet members.  Princeton.edu is 
one such member.  http://www.google.com can easily find others.

That mailing list is in a suspended state because Princeton.edu's 
security rules require that it have a sponsor that is a member of their 
faculty or staff.

The coco mailing list was with out a sponsor for several years before 
the spam infected it, and if princeton.edu information security policies 
had been followed, the mailing list would have been shutdown at that time.

It was only until after a large number of users started leaving the coco 
mailing list and newsgroup due to the spam that first Dennis started 
this list, and then Princeton suspended the mailing list.

I do not know why Princeton suddenly took such action, but my guess was 
that since the mailing list robot was sending a confirmation to each 
e-mail address that it received spam or viruses from, someone who's 
address was forged filed an abuse complaint, and when Princeton.edu 
could not locate a sponsor, they suspended the list per their long 
published policy.

Princeton is willing to restart the list if a member of their staff or a 
student is found that will sponsor the list.  A year ago or so, a search 
of google for such lists shows me only one other bit.listserv.* list 
that was still being run by princeton.edu.

If Princeton.edu decides to, as they have the designated ownership of 
the bit.listserv.coco newsgroup, they could easily get it removed.  My 
guess is that since the newsgroup is not using any physical resources 
controlled by Princeton.edu that Princeton will not make any request to 
have the group removed.

The way that the bit.listserv.* newsgroups are chartered is that they 
are specifically to be gated to active mailing lists.

There is a web form on the newsguy.com news server to request such 
associations to be set up.

The preference is for such newsgroups to be gated to mailing lists on 
bitnet members, however there is precedence for them to be gated to 
mailing lists on other servers.

So while there is a possibility that the bit.listserv.coco can disappear 
with out notice, it probably will not happen.

There was also for some reason some belief that people could lobby their 
local news providers not to delete the bit.listserv.coco newsgroup if 
newsguy.com deleted it.  Even if they decided to keep the newsgroup, 
postings would probably not be propagated to other news servers that 
still carried the newsgroup.  Too many holes would appear in the peering 
between news servers.  So that idea never was practical.

A filtered gateway can be installed between the bit.listserv.coco 
newsgroup and this forum with only a little effort.  Message threading 
would likely be lost as more postings would appear in different order 
than they were originally posted.  We see a little of that now, but with 
another newsgroup gateway it would get worse.

I could have a one-way auto-moderated system that copies the 
bit.listserv.coco postings to here running with in a week.  That 
template of that system has been running since just before Dennis 
started his list up.  I stopped work on it when Dennis announce this 
list.  At the time people were also cross posting to the mailing list 
and the bit.listserv.coco, which would have made the gateway more complex.

It is highly likely that a polite letter to both newsguy.com and 
princeton.edu would turn over the bit.listserv.coco to be a mirror of 
Dennis's mailing list under Dennis or someone else's guardianship, where 
newsguy.com would take over being the gateway.

I would recommend if this were done, that the bit.listserv.coco be 
converted to a moderated newsgroup with a robot program that handles 
almost all the moderation as I have seen done on other newsgroups.

If it is not done by someone here, it could be done by someone else, but 
I do not see what value that would be to them.

Also the amount of spam visible on the bit.listserv.coco will vary 
greatly with the news server that you read it on.  http://www.google.com 
tries to remove spam from it's archive, so that can not be relied on.

Of the several news servers that I can use to access the 
bit.listserv.coco, most of the direct newsgroup spam only shows up on 
one of them.  So it looks like the other news servers have depeered with 
the news servers that are allowing spam to be posted.  This is very 
common with news server providers.

This is also basically a rehash of what I have previously posted on this 
topic.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
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