Xref: utzoo news.admin:14502 news.software.b:7822 Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!sdd.hp.com!caen!ox.com!msen.com!emv From: emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed In-Reply-To: tp@mccall.com's message of 20 May 91 14:30:18 GMT Message-ID: Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator) Organization: MSEN, Inc. Ann Arbor MI References: <1991May16.151523.28123@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991May18.211109.20401@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991May20.093018@mccall.com> Date: Mon, 20 May 1991 17:59:10 GMT In article <1991May20.093018@mccall.com> tp@mccall.com (Terry Poot) writes: >The standard is almost useless if it isn't conformed to by everybody. >Dropping all non-conforming articles makes it perfectly clear what the >problem is -- the RFCs aren't being followed. Have you ever heard of a defacto standard? The defacto standard for dates in usenet messages has for sometime been that set of dates recognized by B news, which has apparently been more generous than the RFC. The C news change now drops messages that have always been acceptable to every news system on the net. One of the reasons for no longer accepting and trying to parse mangled dates is that the date parser needed to cope with the multitude of slightly off date formats is complicated and slow. C News has much faster date munching routines, but they don't understand every possible conceivable date that there is. The slowness of the old date parser was why C News didn't check that articles were too old and thus passed along the periodic bursts of old news. The law of unintended consequences says that whenever you fix one problem, you get a new one. In this case, the tradeoff is between passing old news (bad for everyone) vs. dropping malformed articles (bad for a few individuals). Given some time, everyone who currently has software that puts out mangled dates will be properly coercing into fixing them, and the net as a whole will be more happy. --Ed