Text 9055, 104 rader
Skriven 2005-03-29 22:39:36 av mark lewis (1:3634/12)
   Kommentar till text 9011 av David Drummond (3:640/305)
Ärende: Fidonews Echo Rules
===========================
 >>> You have Echomail Coordinators in the Z1 nodelist segment
 >>> don't you? Well EP1 is the only fidonet document that has
 >>> ever mentioned such functions, so obviously you still
 >>> recognise parts of it.

 JD>> No, Z1 NEVER recognized it.

 DD> Where did Z1 get the EC structure from?

many of the *Cs appointed someone, a helper, to manage the flow of mail which
involved getting the mail and feeding it into the local network... in some
cases, the *EC was viewed as kind of a sugardaddy... i actually had a NEC tell
me that he wouldn't pull and feed an echo because he didn't want to overburden
his already expensive link feed... it wans't long after that that folk realised
that you could link with who ever you wanted to as long as the other party was
willing... there was especially no problems with this idea as long as it was
you footing your bill rather than riding on someone elses...

NECs were first and then the idea of coordination of echomail moved up the
ladder to the regional level as regional only echos were created and their feed
lines were laid out so as to remain within the region... in many cases, this
meant a REC was "at the top" as a central feed point... the same came up at the
zone level, too...

a bit later, the *EC positions were basically no longer seen as feeders of
echomail because many folk were getting their own mail from those they set up
agreements with... at this point, the *ECs could only "coordinate" the mail...
coordinate as in letting folk know who was carrying what so that they could try
to make a feed arrangement if they wanted to...

that job got to be rather hard to do as folk began to realise that those
agreements between them and their feeds were basically private deals... many
systems didn't like being asked who they got their feed from and what areas
they were getting... so they clammed up and basically didn't help the *ECs
gather the information they needed to be able to try to coordinate the echomail
"system"... that lead to a complete breakdown of the *EC position and here we
are today...

during the rise of the *EC positions, there was initially a set of systems,
three of them, that were seen as "the fidonet echomail backbone"... these
systems worked out the meshing scheme and interlinks that would speed delivery
of echomail while "preventing" dupes from flowing out to all the branches of
the network... over time, the membership of this "backbone" changed a few
times... at some point, it was seen that there was a conflict between some
"backbone" members and it was realised that the "backbone" was not an
officially recognised entity in fidonet...

at that point, there was a split and a renaming of the interconnected
systems... suddenly there was the Z1B (Zone 1 Backbone) and the other one...
then the NAB (North American Backbone) was formed and there were two meshed
distribution systems... but there was a problem... mail from one distribution
system wasn't being seen on the other and visa versa... so discussions too
place and it was decided that two systems, one in each mesh would act as
gateways between each meshed distribution system... things went on like this
for a while and, for the most part, everything was ok... then there came
another conflict of some sort and one mesh lost some folk who moved to join the
other mesh... stuff happened and the one mesh tried to hold on and appears to
still be meshed and operational, today, but there is no management or anything
being done on that mesh... the other mesh also continues seemingly in much the
same way...

one of the reasons why there ended up being two backbone meshes was due to a
disagreement on the basic operation of the "backbone" and management of
echos... one side saw no problem in keeping echotags in their configs even
though there was no traffic in them at all... the other side expired echotags
from their configs based on the elisting of the tags /as well as/ the quantity
of traffic flow in the echo...

from the beginning, all of these distribution systems used the elist for basic
information... this is what the elist was created for...

one thing that i see is that other zones didn't get to participate in this
lifecycle but instead generated their own with their own practises and
procedures... the funny part is that all of them got and still get some of
their feed from Z1 at some point... what we see in here with all the fluff
about the elist and such comes simply from those not knowing who, what, why,
when or how these things came to be... all they can see is what they perceive
to be others trying to stuff this stuff down their throats when in fact this
stuff was already here before those folk came along...

i have to laugh, at times, when i stand back and look at all this and i see how
much anarchy there is and i think back to the stuff that i've read about the
origins of fidonet and what the thoughts and ideas were for it as far as what
it was supposed to be and how that was to happen... it has seemingly become
what was actually desired in the beginning... i think ;)

i know that there are more details and additional timeline points that could be
added to the above... i also took special care not to try to get so detailed as
to what dates and such these things took place... i definitely didn't name any
names but i know that those who have been around during this lifecycle and have
been watching will definitely know the names of most all of the players... some
of them might even take offense at some of my statements above... oh well... i
was simply trying to get this out there as generically accurate as possible
without stepping on any toes O:)

[after all this writting, i probably should take this and add it to my
historical info of fidonet and possibly even start going back and trying to
timeline it all for accuracy... i dunno... this won't be the first time that
i've done something like this and not kept it for prosperity and historical
note.]

)\/(ark

 * Origin: (1:3634/12)