Canceling Course News Posts

Course accounts are able to cancel news articles to the course's uw.cs newsgroup with the cancel-news script.

• articles may be canceled from the command-line by specifying the article number.
• articles may be canceled by piping the offending article (at least the headers) into cancel-news.

• the script will display the entire article in a pager (hit q to only show the first page).
• the user is normally required to confirm the cancellation with a Y or y followed by carriage-return.
  • a -f (or --force) parameter will "force" the cancellation with no article display, no confirmation; use with appropriate care.
• a -d (or --dry-run) parameter will do everything up until the actual cancel, to see what the program would do.

Cancellations for articles which have reached external news providers (e.g. Google groups) may not be honoured by the external provider. UW has no control over what happens to news articles after they leave the campus.

Examples

Example 1: article number on command-line

cs134@student.cs~> cancel-news 49152
Path: news.uwaterloo.ca!services108.cs.uwaterloo.ca!spammer
From: spammer 
Newsgroups: uw.cs.cs134
Subject: spammity spam
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 16:15:15 -0400
Organization: University of Waterloo
Lines: 1
Message-ID: 
NNTP-Posting-Host: services108.cs.uwaterloo.ca
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
X-Trace: rumours.uwaterloo.ca 1275682516 25772 129.97.152.165 (4 Jun 2010 20:15:16 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: abuse@uwaterloo.ca
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 20:15:16 +0000 (UTC)
Xref: news.uwaterloo.ca uw.cs.cs134:49152

Here are the products we offer.

-- more --

[ press q ]

Confirm article cancel [Yy] and press return: [ type y and press return ]

Done.
cs134@student.cs~> 

Example 2: send article from another program

• User is running mutt to read news (as course-account user).
• the currently viewed article should be cancelled.
• user types |cancel-news (first character is vertical bar/pipe symbol) and views the article
• user types y and presses return.

-- DanielAllen - 04 Jun 2010