Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!tower
From: tower@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Leonard H. Tower Jr.)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Tired of bogus subject lines?
Summary: sigh, both the nn'ers and the rn'ers can have what they want ...
Message-ID: <40005@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 11 Oct 89 01:07:59 GMT
References: <7921@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <1650@unocss.UUCP> <11521@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <6118@ficc.uu.net> <11527@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: tower@bu-it.bu.edu (Leonard H. Tower Jr.)
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: Information Technology, Boston University,
       111 Cummington Street, Boston, MA  02215, USA  +1 (617) 353-2780
Lines: 32


	[ Excuse the lateness of this, I'm just catching up on
	  news.admin after a very heavy month. ] 	  

nn could pass these header lines to inews:
	Subject: Re: ORIGINAL TEXT
	X-NN-Re-Count: 2
or whatever the count is.  The X- is recommended to be used by
RFC-822, which promises that no version of RFC-822 will ever have a
header line starting with X-.  The whol header line title is
just an example.  It could be shortened or made what ever the nn
people like.

When nn sees an X-NN-Re-Count: header line.  It would NOT display it,
but would display the Subject line as:
        Subject: Re^2: ORIGINAL TEXT
or whatever the count is.  Note that this is NOT the Subject line in
the news spool file.

Yes, it would cost a few more bytes per article posted by nn.

Yes, some news readers would require people to add X-NN-Re-Count: to
a list of header lines to ignore.

But, it would allow this kind of experiment to be tried and let the nn
users have the kind of information they want displayed, while not
violating the standards and bothering users of other news readers
constantly.

Yours for solving problems at the proper level of abstraction.

thanx -len