From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@silverton.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sun, 22 May 94 16:33:57 PDT
To: djb@silverton.berkeley.edu
Subject: why moderate when you can write some code instead?
Message-ID: <199405222229.PAA24497@silverton.berkeley.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


(I'm not on cypherpunks... but alt.fan.david-sternlight is. [chuckle])

Attached is an article I wrote recently on the proposed moderation of
alt.sources. You can see its possible relevance to talk.politics.crypto
and sci.crypt. Someone just has to sit down and add a few lines to rn.

---Dan

Path: silverton.berkeley.edu!djb
From: djb@silverton.berkeley.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
Message-ID: <5423.May2612.03.1993@silverton.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed May 26 12:03:19 GMT 1993
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d,alt.config
Subject: Re: Serious proposal to make alt.sources MODERATED
References: <1993May10.171718.26298@infodev.cam.ac.uk>
Organization: IR

Whenever a social problem is caused by technology, it can be fixed by
better technology.

I want to tell rn, ``Make me a newsgroup consisting of certain articles
from alt.sources. Which articles? Well, read through alt.sources.index,
take all the Message-ID's listed there, and select those articles from
alt.sources for me. Call this new newsgroup alt.sources.indexed. Oh,
yeah, dump all the other articles into alt.sources.nonindexed.''

Maybe this would be easier for rn if alt.sources.index articles had a
specialized ``article selector'' format. No big deal. All that's
important is that there be _some_ selector format which we can use.

Note that I might decide later that I don't like alt.sources.index; I
prefer the selectors which Joe Shmoe posts every day in alt.frobozz.
I should be able to tell rn, ``Make me a virtual group with every
article from Joe titled SOURCE SELECTOR. Call it alt.frobozz.shmoe.''
Then I can use alt.frobozz.joeshmoe in place of alt.sources.index.

I expect that selectors, when properly implemented, will entirely
replace moderated groups. They'd be an easy first step for the USENET
Interface Project.

---Dan