Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!sun-barr!texsun!texbell!ssbn!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Tired of bogus subject lines?
Message-ID: <10812@looking.on.ca>
Date: 11 Sep 89 02:19:48 GMT
References: <7921@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <1650@unocss.UUCP> <11509@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <6115@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 25
Class: discussion

Is it so evil? Over 4 years ago, I think, some new features were added
to the news software, namely the "References:" line and more recently
the "Supersedes" line.   In fact, those were about the last two
significant improvements to the format.

Years later these lines still can't be used properly because of all the
people running old and non-compliant posting software.  Possibly it
will never be possible to use them.

How you read and edit news on your own machine is your own business.
But the format of what you post out to the rest of the net is the
one thing on the net that's everybody's business.

Actually, nn's "crime" isn't too bad.  There are worse ones.  But what
other mechanisms are there to help in this direction?

The method proposed is actually one I invented almost 7 years ago to
stop the regular daily postings to net.test that happened whenever
somebody brought up news on their machine.

Usenet is a minarchy but there's one thing that everybody has to agree
upon, and that's the basic file format.  In some ways, the file format
*is* usenet.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473