Subj : Re: Rougue bot
To   : Apam
From : Atreyu
Date : Mon Nov 08 2021 07:26 pm

On 09 Nov 21  08:58:18, Apam said the following to Atreyu:

A> It might not happen very often, and the problem might be caused by one
A> incompetent Sysop, but it's everyones problem, at least everyone who got
A> ~8000 of the same message in their base.

Then Avon should be the one to pull the plug on that system if in fact its
causing problems for everyone. You are not allowed to have a feed until you 
confirm you fixed your broken system. Harsh? Maybe... but an effective "fix".

I've had to pull the plug on maybe... one or two systems... in two decades.

So it just doesn't happen often that I'm required to take action, but:

A> It's not a hard thing to keep a file with a rolling log of message content
A> hashes along with a time received, and acting accordingly.

I'm the author of a major mailer/tosser and had added this functionality in
my product recently. It wasn't because of this incident but due to the 
stubbornness of some insisting on running software that strips Seen-By lines.

But I'm not a fan of adding this level of checking for a few reasons which
could morph into a whole other uninteresting topic altogether.

A> Ok, so press next 8000 times. I don't think anyone is flaming that

I wouldn't press Next 8000 times. I would just tell my BBS to mark the
lastread pointer ahead 8000 messages. Its not a problem for me, is my point.

Two decades of running this Hub with now close to a hundred links... many
international, many are inexperienced Sysops, many are peering/meshing, 
many know-it-all-Linux-techno-geeks; almost all the links are running various
combinations of software, OS's, etc, etc... yadda yadda, you get to see
these problems "first hand".

Every couple of years we seem to have someone rescan/dump old messages 
everywhere... often with new MSGID's, different header CRC, dates, you 
name it... I'm actually used to it now.

Atreyu

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
 * Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)

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