Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!rsk
From: rsk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Tired of bogus subject lines?
Message-ID: <11527@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 11 Sep 89 04:02:09 GMT
References: <7921@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <1650@unocss.UUCP> <11521@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <6118@ficc.uu.net>
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: rsk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
Lines: 25

In article <6118@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Strictly speaking you're correct. Perhaps "evil and rude" is incorrect. A
>better description of this sort of activity is "stupid". People should not
>be literal minded idiots dancing to the tune of an admittedly flawed RFC.

Well, until someone writes another RFC to replace the existing one, it's all
we've got, flaws or not -- and silently tossing an article into "junk"
because of a noncompliant "Subject" line doesn't seem inherently different
to me than junking it because it has no "From" line, a badly formatted "Date",
or any other problem.

This debate seems backward to me -- the folks who created NN are the ones
who wired in the broken code, and I don't think their actions create an
obligation on the rest of us to support it.

>Subject lines are created by people, not a rigid peice of software. Zapping
>articles because a subject line is a slight variant of the RFC makes as much
>sense as zapping an article because the keywords are poorly chosen or because
>the signature is longer than 4 lines.

Actually the followup "Subject" lines *are* created by software, which is
how we got into this in the first place.  And, yes, I think junking articles
with more than 4 lines of signature is an excellent idea.

---Rsk