"Claus" == Claus F\xE4rber
<list-ietf-rfc822(_at_)faerber(_dot_)muc(_dot_)de> writes:
Russ Allbery <rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu> schrieb/wrote:
comes to Usenet feed patterns. Right now, it's common to attempt
to exclude certain types of binaries with patterns like @*mp3* and
@*dvd*; so long as all newsgroup names are ASCII words, this works
fairly well,
Claus> Building filters that way will also catch some innocent
Claus> discussion group, e.g. a discussion group about CD-ROM and DVD
Claus> drives.
Claus> If you filter alt.binaries.*mp3, you already avoid problems
Claus> with IDNA names.
Plenty of big MP3 binary groups would get through, too.
But that's not really the point - sites choose to exclude *mp3* from
feeds knowing (one hopes) that it will hit discussion groups about mp3
as well as the binaries themselves. It's quite something else for that
to result in them excluding completely unrelated groups just because
of encoded name artifacts.
(It's not just !*mp3*, either. Other common exclusions include !*warez*,
!*teen*, !*pedo*, !*bin* (or *bina*, *binar*, etc.), !*sex* (yes, this
also caught uk.local.essex), and so on.)
--
Andrew.