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From: ske@pkmab.se (Kristoffer Eriksson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: article "header" contains non-header line
Message-ID: <5299@pkmab.se>
Date: 13 Apr 91 04:40:30 GMT
References: <1991Mar25.220106.25166@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991Mar28.080325.7729@Daisy.EE.UND.AC.ZA> <1991Mar28.165240.13757@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Peridot Konsult i Mellansverige AB, Oerebro, Sweden
Lines: 58

In article <1991Mar28.165240.13757@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> How about mail-to-administrator or store-in-junk-newsgroup or
>>store-somewhere-and-mail-pointer-to-administrator?
>
> The above suggestions work fine for one or two articles, but less well for
>ten thousand "obviously bad" articles.

Where would you get ten thousand bad articles from? And why would it not work
to store them somewhere (for instance in junk), if it would have worked to
store them together with all other news had they just contained a few more
spaces in strategic places?


And in article <1991Mar30.224201.20534@zoo.toronto.edu> he writes:
>There were various possibilities for how to go about this, but it always
>seemed to boil down to the hard, cold fact that people seldom fix their
>news software until they are forced to.  Alerts just don't help much.

Since silently dropping bad articles won't force anyone to do anything, what
you are saying is that this problem may very well never be fixed. But in
that case it is bad policy to drop these articles, that are only formally
bad but not unparsable, because you won't make the problem go away, but
you will be punishing all the people who unknowingly post their articles
with bad posting software, and all other people who would have enjoyed
reading the dropped articles. If you think the problem will not go away,
the only reasonable thing to do is to give in and make the best of the
situation as it is, as others have already pointed out: be liberal in what
you receive and conservative in what you send. Headers missing a space are
very far from irrecoverable.


And in article <1991Apr5.081416.6660@zoo.toronto.edu> he writes:
>The alternative is to inundate him with, potentially, hundreds of complaints
>*per posting*.

If you return the complaint and don't forward the article, the number of
comlaints will depend on the (electronic) distans between the sender and
the first C news site on any separate branch of the senders connectivity
tree. Some will get only one or a few complaints, and some will get
complaints from all over the world.

You might look at the articles path and only send complaints if the article
hasn't passed an unreasonable number of sites.

But apart from that, why would a few hundred comlaints be such a bad thing?
When it has become known at the sending site that sending messages doesn't
work well, they have no reason to be sending any more messages until the
problem is fixed, so at least it doesn't have to be a continuing nuiscance.
And, talking about forcing people to fix their software, isn't a full
mailbox of complaints more of a force than plain silence?

However, automatically correcting missing spaces would remove this question
alltogether...

-- 
Kristoffer Eriksson, Peridot Konsult AB, Hagagatan 6, S-703 40 Oerebro, Sweden
Phone: +46 19-13 03 60  !  e-mail: ske@pkmab.se
Fax:   +46 19-11 51 03  !  or ...!{uunet,mcsun}!sunic.sunet.se!kullmar!pkmab!ske