Subject: Limiting news distribution

24. *****
 Q: What are the distribution area codes for Usenet news postings?

 A: If you look at the header of a Usenet news posting, you'll
observe that it includes the a line "Distribution:" where you might
put a limited area code like usa, na (North America), local etc.
Don't trust this. The distribution limitation is not guaranteed to
work. In global newsgroups a local distribution can easily "leak"
since not all configurations along the feed observe this feature.
Thus the distribution field in the header is best left unchanged.
The best advice is always assume that the newsgroups default will
take precedence. In practice that means a "world" distribution in
news hierarchies like news. and comp. The New users' newsgroup
news.newusers.questions is a good case in point. Always assume world
distribution. Hence the frequent question where to find the
different distribution codes is somewhat moot.
   Kent_Landfield@sterling.com writes on this in is own FAQ
(reprinted with permission): In theory the distributions work as
intended, but in practice, due to lack of verification by posting
agents, misconfigured news transport agents, wide-area sites which
pick up all news regardless of distribution, and inadequate controls
on the names of the distributions, they are relatively useless.
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