> Fritz,
>
> John,
>
> It looks like a news group is impossible if we do it within the USELESSNET
> technology. First Step Research, for security reasons, will not allow
> anyone from the outside to look at news groups they host.
>
> well, the moscow.* groups are accessable by pointing your news reader to
> news.moscow.com (but its a hack solution....). I'll talk to the sysadmins
> at the U's. there SHOULD be a way to pull this off.
Well...I'm the UI news adiministrator so I guess I should respond. It is
the UI policy to only allow newsreader access from addresses on campus or
from SLIP/PPP connections on our terminal server. The
few national sites that allow general access to news restrict such
access to off-hours. The UI is in no position to support general
news access.
We could certainly feed our local news to other sites such as
moscow.com but that still doesn't get around the fundamental
weaknesses that 1) not everyone has access to a newsreader, and
2) not everyone has access to the news servers here (UI and
moscow.com).
> The alternative would be a html site for a "news group" accessible from
> anywhere, without being advertised everywhere. The problem there is that
> most of the vision2020 subscribers do not have ppp accounts, they mostly
> have text based remote terminal accounts from the universities.
>
> Time for the U's to open up to PPP access I think that would move things
> forward in great steps.
Our university does provide SLIP/PPP access but only for faculty,
students, and staff. (We wouldn't want to take business away from
First Step!)
I once thought that newsgroups would be the death of listservs. But
just the opposite has happened. Listservs continue to be popular
for a number of reasons, mostly convenience and the fact that they
cater to the lowest common denominator.
-- Greg Brown gregb@uidaho.edu Computer Services Moscow, ID 83843 University of Idaho (208) 885-2126