Thomas Wouters wrote:

On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 02:04:27PM +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

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I've asked this question before: when are we going to see comp.lang.python.announce back online ?

Barry is working on this, by modifying Mailman to play moderator (via the normal list-admin's post-approval mechanism.) As I'm sure he'll tell you himself, when he wakes up ;)

This sounds like an aweful lot of work... wouldn't a quick hack as intermediate solution suffice for the moment (it needen't even go into any public Mailman release -- just the Mailman installation at python.org which handles the announcement list). Ok, I'll wait for Barry to wake up ;-) ... <ringring> -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/

the-only-time-in-the-last-year-i've-been-truly-awake-was-when-i jammed-with-eric-at-ipc8-ly y'rs,

And that was really good! You should do it more often! Let's make sure we organize a jam session in advance for icp9 -- that way we can get more folks to bring instruments, berries, sugar, bread, butter, etc. i-don't-jam-i-listen-ly y'rs, --david

And that was really good! You should do it more often!

Agreed!

Let's make sure we organize a jam session in advance for icp9 -- that way we can get more folks to bring instruments, berries, sugar, bread, butter, etc.

This sounds much more fun (and more Pythonic) than a geeks-with-guns event! :-) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)

Guido van Rossum wrote:

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I've asked this question before: when are we going to see comp.lang.python.announce back online ?

I know that everyone is busy with getting the betas ready, but looking at www.python.org I find that the "latest" special announcement is dated 22-Mar-2000. People will get the false idea that Python isn't moving anywhere... at least not in the spirit of OSS' "release early and often".

Could someone please summarize what needs to be done to post a message to comp.lang.python.announce without taking the path via the official (currently defunct) moderator ?

I've had a look at the c.l.p.a postings and the only special header they include is the "Approved: fleck@informatik.uni-bonn.de" header.

If this is all it takes to post to a moderated newsgroup, fixing Mailman to do the trick should be really simple.

I'm willing to help here to get this done *before* the Python 2.0beta1 announcement.

Coincidence! Barry just wrote the necessary hacks that allow a Mailman list to be used to moderate a newsgroup, and installed them in python.org. He's testing the setup today and I expect that we'll be able to solicit for moderators tonight!

Way cool :-) Thanks. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/

"Barry A. Warsaw" wrote:

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"M" == M writes:

M> I've asked this question before: when are we going to see M> comp.lang.python.announce back online ?

M> If this is all it takes to post to a moderated newsgroup, M> fixing Mailman to do the trick should be really simple.

M> I'm willing to help here to get this done *before* the Python M> 2.0beta1 announcement.

MAL, you must be reading my mind!

I've actually been working on some unofficial patches to Mailman that will let list admins moderate a moderated newsgroup. The technical details are described in a recent post to mailman-developers[1].

Cool... :-)

I'm testing it out right now. I first installed this on starship, but there's no nntp server that starship can post to, so I've since moved the list to python.org. However, I'm still having some problems with the upstream feed, or at least I haven't seen approved messages appearing on deja or my ISP's server. I'm not exactly sure why; could just be propagation delays.

Anyway, if anybody does see my test messages show up in the newsgroup (not the gatewayed mailing list -- sorry David), please let me know.

Nothing has appeared at my ISP yet. Looking at the mailing list archives, the postings don't have the Approved: header (but perhaps it's just the archive which doesn't include it). -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/

On Sat, Aug 26, 2000 at 10:31:05AM +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

Markus Fleck wrote:

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I've had a look at the c.l.p.a postings and the only special header they include is the "Approved: fleck@informatik.uni-bonn.de" header.

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Basically, that's all it takes to post to a "moderated" newsgroup. (Talking about a case of "security by obscurity" here... :-/) Actually, the string following the "Approved: " may even be random...

Yes, it can be completely random. We're talking about USENET here, it wasn't designed for complicated procedures :-)

Wow, so much for spam protection.

Well, we have a couple of 'moderated' lists locally, and I haven't, in 5 years, seen anyone fake an Approved: header. Of course, the penalty of doing so would be severe, but we haven't even had to warn anyone, either, so how could they know that ? :) I also think most news-administrators are quite uhm, strict, in that kind of thing. If any of our clients were found faking Approved: headers, they'd get a not-very-friendly warning. If they do it a second time, they lose their account. The news administrators I talked with at SANE2000 (sysadmin conference) definately shared the same attitude. This isn't email, with arbitrary headers and open relays and such, this is usenet, where you have to have a fair bit of clue to keep your newsserver up and running :) And up to now, spammers have been either too dumb or too smart to figure out how to post to moderated newsgroups... I hope that if anyone ever does, the punishment will be severe enough to scare away the rest ;P -- Thomas Wouters Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!