XPost: comp.std.misc

[Cross-posting to news:comp.std.misc , as suggested in
news:vs73t3$3hlga$[email protected] , but setting Followup-To:
news:comp.misc , as the former group doesn't seem to be active.]

As some might know, back in March I've volunteered to take over
moderation of comp.newprod and comp.std.announce newsgroups
that are currently unusable due to the lack of a moderator.
(My news.groups.proposals post is in the References:.)

In my post I also suggested for comp.simulation (and a few other
non-comp.* groups) to become unmoderated. I don't seem to see
any response to that, so assuming the intent is still to remove
it, I'm volunteering to take over its moderation as well.

Like I've mentioned, I've never had much interest in moderated
newsgroups before, much less been a moderator of one, so I can't
promise smooth operation, especially right from the start.

And regardless, I'd prefer not doing the thing entirely on my
own; anyone here interested in taking part, perchance?

My plan is to set up message submission email addresses aliased
to my own mailbox, and approve (or not approve) them from there.
Should there ever be any co-moderators, I'd move submissions to
a password-protected portion of an https: website and provide
an HTTP/1-based API (usable with curl(1) and compatible with
Lynx, naturally) to approve the messages there.

It's possible that I'd implement a whitelist of known-good
posters for auto-approval, though that will require a way for
the software to /identify/ such posters. Such as, e. g., a
direct email message (Newsgroups: and all) to the submission
address, with a valid DKIM signature for the MAIL FROM: domain.

There're scarcely any mention of the groups at hand under
http://ftp.isc.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/comp/
(they might've been created outside of the Big-8 practices
employed today): comp.windows.x.i386unix and comp.lsi.testing
mention news:comp.newprod and news:comp.simulation ,
respectively, while comp.remove-former-inet lists .std.announce
among the groups proposed for deletion, though the group was
kept in the end.

My intent for the groups is to, obviously, keep them on-topic.
Other than that, I'm going to check for what IETF / IESG
announcement lists are around here and, if fitting, start
forwarding messages from there to comp.std.announce.

My secondary objective would be to keep the groups reasonably
low-traffic, limiting the number of posts (so to save the
readers from pressing "next, please" too many times, etc.)
rather their cumulative size (data transfer is cheap these
days, though my MX /does/ have rather tight message size
limits.) In particular, I might, on occasion, ask users to
repost their handful of articles of few lines each as a single
larger one.

Should any of the groups attract too much traffic (as unlikely
as it is to happen), I'd be proposing some sort of quality
guidelines, and, once those are enacted, start rejecting
articles failing to meet them.

By the by, I'd appreciate Message-Id:s of whatever periodic
postings that were seen there. A cursory web search didn't
reveal much to go by, and as the groups might've been created
outside of the Big-8 process, there's no charter on file for
them, either.

That'd be all for now. Thoughts?

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XPost: news.groups.proposals

Follow-Up2: news.groups.proposals

On 26.04.2025 18:42 Uhr Ivan Shmakov wrote:

[Cross-posting to news:comp.std.misc , as suggested in
news:vs73t3$3hlga$[email protected] , but setting Followup-To:
news:comp.misc , as the former group doesn't seem to be
active.]

As some might know, back in March I've volunteered to take
over moderation of comp.newprod and comp.std.announce newsgroups
that are currently unusable due to the lack of a moderator.
(My news.groups.proposals post is in the References:.)

In my post I also suggested for comp.simulation (and a few
other non-comp.* groups) to become unmoderated. I don't seem to see
any response to that, so assuming the intent is still to
remove it, I'm volunteering to take over its moderation as well.

If so, please mention it in the RfD discussion and also CC that to [email protected], so we definitely not miss it.

Like I've mentioned, I've never had much interest in moderated
newsgroups before, much less been a moderator of one, so I
can't promise smooth operation, especially right from the start.

Depends on what you want to do. You will need moderation infrastructure
(or ask others that already have), this normally works fine.

And regardless, I'd prefer not doing the thing entirely on my
own; anyone here interested in taking part, perchance?

I don't see a problem here if you operate it on your own.

My plan is to set up message submission email addresses
aliased to my own mailbox, and approve (or not approve) them from
there.

This will probably not work if your have an inbox at Google/MS/Yahoo
out of the box.

Should there ever be any co-moderators, I'd move submissions to
a password-protected portion of an https: website and provide
an HTTP/1-based API (usable with curl(1) and compatible with
Lynx, naturally) to approve the messages there.

There is webstump for that.

It's possible that I'd implement a whitelist of known-good
posters for auto-approval, though that will require a way for
the software to /identify/ such posters. Such as, e. g., a
direct email message (Newsgroups: and all) to the submission
address, with a valid DKIM signature for the MAIL FROM:
domain.

Webstump can use rules based on sender address, but DKIM will not be
available by design. The message is being injected into the news server
the poster is using and then sent to the moderation servers (e.g.
mine). This will forward it to the submission address. DKIM signing
needs the private key of the domain (e.g. example.org) and the mail
never passes the MSA/MTA of example.org.

Forging is possible here.

My intent for the groups is to, obviously, keep them on-topic.
Other than that, I'm going to check for what IETF / IESG
announcement lists are around here and, if fitting, start
forwarding messages from there to comp.std.announce.

Fine in my eyes.




--
kind regards
Marco

Send spam to [email protected]

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XPost: news.misc

So, it's happened; I've just posted announcements to the groups:

news:[email protected] - news:comp.simulation news:[email protected] - news:comp.newprod news:[email protected] - news:rec.photo.moderated

(Still have some research to do for the news:comp.std.announce
announcement.)

I'm posting this here in comp.misc for several reasons:

* I believe that among the readers here might be those interested
in joining these groups, or those who know those who might be;

* I'm curious what issues with my "common submission guidelines"
below an open discussion might reveal;

* I'd rather not post said guidelines to each of the groups
individually.

I'm also cross-posting to news.misc because it seems more
fitting, though it doesn't seem to have been active recently.
Feel free to respond there (disregarding Followup-To:) instead
if you like; if anything, I'll be monitoring both groups for
this discussion.

The guidelines below apply to comp.newprod, comp.simulation,
comp.std.announce and rec.photo.moderated; and reflect both
what I consider to be "good Usenet behavior," and how the
things are currently set up on my side.


Usenet is a public forum and as such, articles submitted
to newsgroups are expected to be of interest to readers at
large, not aimed at a particular person. If you believe a
participant of the group might have an issue with something
that is not strictly under the topic of the group, please
communicate your considerations elsewhere, such as by email.

The use of your "real" name in From: is not strictly required,
but a /consistent/ identity is still expected. "Example Inc.
Sales Department" might be suitable for comp.newprod
submissions; and your Wikimedia Commons account name, for your
rec.photo.moderated ones.

It is recommended that an *.invalid domain email address is
used in From:, both to thwart email address harvesters /and/
to avoid your submission being rejected due to SPF mismatch.
That said, there should be a valid email address, and one
you're entitled to use, /somewhere/ in the message (say,
Reply-To: or the signature.) Mangling is allowed, so long as
the mail domain ends with .invalid /and/ it is obvious to me
how to get the original address from there. Postings that
lack a valid email address might be approved, but if they're
rejected, you won't know why.

It's possible to submit articles directly over email (see
below.) In such a case, please use an appropriate valid
address in the envelope (MAIL FROM:.)

Submissions should not exceed 128 KiB in size (header + body.)
While my MTA /will/ accept somewhat larger ones to account for
transit overhead (Received: and such), one should not rely on that.

As an aside, note that Usenet archives might truncate long
articles. For example, http://al.howardknight.net/ IME only
stores up to 200 lines of the body.

By the same merit, if you forward an article from elsewhere
(say, from a blog), be sure to include the original URI near
the /top/ of your post: that way, even if the article gets
truncated, someone reading it from archives will still be
pointed to the full orignal instance. It's also nice as it
allows the reader to stop reading the article early if they
do not find the original site to their taste.

Avoid using non-ASCII characters in the headers: while some
newsreaders do support RFC 2047, others do not.

Submission bodies should be "plain" plain text (MIME type
"text/plain", no format=flowed, etc.), either ASCII (with or
without MIME headers), or 8-bit UTF-8 (MIME headers required.)
If your submission has other parts (say, text/html), I'll
remove them, unless it's obvious to me that they are important
to the message as a whole, in which case I'll reject and ask
to resubmit. In exceptional cases, I might edit your submission
to fit if it doesn't already.


It's possible to submit articles by email, such as explained
in http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderated_newsgroups
#How_can_I_bypass_my_News_Service_Provider? (URI split for
readability.)

To use this option, first make sure your message has a proper
Newsgroups: header. (At some point I'm going to configure my Exim
instance to reject emails to the submission addresses lacking one.)

Messages submitted this way should have a valid email address
in the envelope (MAIL FROM:), must not fail SPF verification,
and preferrably should also have a valid DKIM signature. Note
that it's generally still possible (and advisable) to have an
*.invalid address in the From: header.

On a Unix-like system with appropriately configured mail delivery,
the following example /usr/sbin/sendmail invocation can be used
as a starting point (tested on Debian GNU/Linux "Bookworm", but
if I'm reading sendmail(1) correctly, it should work on NetBSD
just as well; refer to the individual announcements for the
actual submission addresses):

$ cat < newspost
From: Alice <[email protected]d>
Reply-To: Alice <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: example.newsgroup.moderated
Message-Id: <[email protected]d>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:45:08 +0000
Subject: test

This is a test message.
$ /usr/sbin/sendmail \
-i -f [email protected] \
[email protected] \
< newspost

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In comp.misc Ivan Shmakov <[email protected]d> wrote:

It's possible to submit articles by email, such as explained
in http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderated_newsgroups

^

#How_can_I_bypass_my_News_Service_Provider? (URI split for
readability.)

Broken link - needs a capital 'N'.

On a Unix-like system with appropriately configured mail delivery,
the following example /usr/sbin/sendmail invocation can be used
as a starting point (tested on Debian GNU/Linux "Bookworm", but
if I'm reading sendmail(1) correctly, it should work on NetBSD
just as well; refer to the individual announcements for the
actual submission addresses):

$ cat < newspost
From: Alice <[email protected]d>
Reply-To: Alice <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: example.newsgroup.moderated
Message-Id: <[email protected]d>

I'd suggest including how the unique part of the Message-Id can be
generated, or at least warning that this part must be generated for
each message. Examples with unique IDs in them tempt people to
re-use that unique ID.

I've subscribed to comp.newprod and rec.photo.moderated since I'm
interested in them, although I don't currently have cause to post
in either.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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On 2025-06-20, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
In comp.misc Ivan Shmakov wrote:

I'm also cross-posting to news.misc because it seems more fitting,
though it doesn't seem to have been active recently.

(Should've rather cross-posted to news.groups, which is both
a better fit /and/ active.)

It's possible to submit articles by email, such as explained
in http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderated_newsgroups

^

#How_can_I_bypass_my_News_Service_Provider? (URI split for
readability.)

Broken link - needs a capital 'N'.

Indeed, thanks.

On a Unix-like system with appropriately configured mail delivery,
the following example /usr/sbin/sendmail invocation can be used as
a starting point:

$ cat < newspost
From: Alice <[email protected]d>
Reply-To: Alice <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: example.newsgroup.moderated
Message-Id: <[email protected]d>

I'd suggest including how the unique part of the Message-Id can be generated, or at least warning that this part must be generated for
each message. Examples with unique IDs in them tempt people to
re-use that unique ID.

Fair enough. I shouldn't have included either that or Date:
in the example at all, as the mail subsystem adds them if
missing anyway. Though it makes sense to mention that the
harvesters can gather mail domains from Message-Id:s just as
well; if anything, they're right there in the overview,
alongside From:s and References:.

Also, pre-generating a Message-Id: might aid troubleshooting
should the message be lost in transit, though with the low
traffic I'm anticipating for these groups, knowing From: and
the day it was submitted would probably be sufficient.

I've subscribed to comp.newprod and rec.photo.moderated since I'm
interested in them, although I don't currently have cause to post
in either.

I'm the least hopeful about .newprod, and certainly don't
expect to have any reason to post there myself in the
foreseeable future (aside of a periodic pointer to guidelines
and such), but it sure would be nice to get it to work.

I can think of things to post to rec.photo.moderated (and
comp.simulation, FTM), though I'm not sure there's much reason
to prefer it to rec.photo.digital at this point.

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