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From: jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: An apology for the invalid control messages.
Message-ID: <38053@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 8 Aug 90 23:33:41 GMT
References: <25157.26b95615@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <3295@stl.stc.co.uk>
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Reply-To: jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
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In article <3295@stl.stc.co.uk>, dww@stl.stc.co.uk (David Wright) writes:
[ Someone mis-spelled cancel as Cancel in a control message, generating
  tons of mail ]

|> More seriously - its an easy mistake to make.   And why should control
|> messages be case-sensitive anyway?    I suggest that the maintainers of B
|> and C news add a patch to the next set thereof which makes the check for
|> control command case-insensitive.   Only a small thing, but it will prevent
|> re-occurance of this particular problem, at least for up to date sites,
|> which after a suitable number of years will be most of them.

No, it won't help much, David.  When someone writes "cancell" in a control
message, will you then ask for the Interlisp DWIM package (do what I mean)
to be added to news?

The bug happened because the current software propogates bogus control
messages.  If it threw them away instead with a message on stderr when
you tried to post one, the original sender would have gotten an error
message and no cruft would have been sent out to other systems.

If an article is defective in some way, it should not be forwarded to other
sites.


--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck