Rethinking the utility of netnews "cancel" control messages

[Bryce]

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 "Erik E. Fair" (Time Keeper) <fair at clock.org> wrote:
> At 9:50 10/5/95, Rich Salz wrote:
> >Cancel/Supercede is a useful model -- architecting them out of Usenet
> >is a very bad idea.  Ask Clarinet.
> 
> Is it? The principal effects of not having the mechanism is a slightly
> higher disk storage requirement for netnews - something completely unheard
> of in the annals of USENET.
> 
> The downsides of having the mechanism (especially unauthenticated) we see
> now: official and unofficial squelching of articles that someone doesn't
> like for whatever arbitrary or situational reason.

<snip>


Look just replace "cancel" with "mark as worthless and sign".  Then 
each reader may choose to "honor" the "cancel" or not.  If you are 
reading clari.news.world then you completely "honor" cancels signed by 
ClariNet.  If you are reading alt.religion.scientology, then you have 
your user agent specifically bring "cancelled" articles to your 
attention for reading.  :-)


(As an aside this serves for moderation as well.  Just tell your
user agent to honor messages marked as "cancelled, signed Bob The 
Moderator" and you have entered a moderated newsgroup.  And the 
protocol that's gonna bring it to you?  NoCeM and its relatives.  Real 
Soon Now, I think.)


Bryce

signatures follow

            "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."   
    <a href="http://ugrad-www.cs.colorado.edu/~wilcoxb/Niche.html">

                          bryce at colorado.edu                   </a>

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