On Thu, 09 Apr 2015, Kees van Eeten wrote to mark lewis:

 JG>>    Some NC's use an automated Ping System, by which they send a 
 JG>> net-mail message out, and the sysop is required to reply to it in 
 JG>> order to stay listed, otherwise the board gets marked down, and 
 JG>> after so many weeks, it gets removed.

 ml> interesting... i don't think i've heard of this before... it would 
 ml> be easy enough to automate the responses, though... netmgr handles 
 ml> things like this with its eyes closed...

 KvE>  The systems that receive the pings and answer in some way or 
 KvE> another are o.k.  It would weed out the large number of systems 
 KvE> that have ceased to exist,  such as the 130+ nodes that are 
 KvE> listed with hostnames, that do no longer  exist in DNS.

agreed... to a point...

)\/(ark