Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!samsung!news.cs.indiana.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!mp.cs.niu.edu!rickert From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews. Message-ID: <1991May24.032746.1237@mp.cs.niu.edu> Date: 24 May 91 03:27:46 GMT References: <1991May23.115029.10971@mp.cs.niu.edu> <91May23.151914edt.1030@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> Organization: Northern Illinois University Lines: 45 [In response to suggestions that whenever the Date proves unparseable, inews should insert the date of posting, instead of allowing the article to just be discarded, ..] In article <91May23.151914edt.1030@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) writes: >Unfortunately, inews is not exclusively used for human input. Sites >have been known to use it for gatewaying mailing lists, for instance. Exactly the point. Most of the bad dates are probably from mailers, often due to unknown time zones. >(Bad idea, given inews performance) Scripts will get used for things >the authors did not intend they be used for; given the cost of errors >on Usenet (as our usenet mailbox fills up with hundreds of newgroups >caused by escaping control messages :-), it's best to be cautious. Well, I am not using inews for this, but I am using the posting date for gatewayed mail if the date header is unparseable. Now since you think I am doing something so very dangerous, could you please explain what it is? I know. You are worried that old news will be recirculated, and somehow get back to inews, flooding the net with stale news. No, that can't be it. After all the stale news has to have valid date headers to have made it past relaynews, so the dates in this case are not unparseable, the old date will be retained, and the article rejected as stale. Ah. I've thought of it. You are a purist. You can't stand the idea that we might give the posting date instead of the date of authorship. But no, that can't be it either, since inews does that all the time if there is no date header. Perhaps you are worried that someone will take some really old news, and maliciously damage the date beyond recognition before resubmitting to inews. But, come to think of it, that makes no sense either. After all it would be even easier for this malicious individual to just delete the date header, in which case inews will use the current date anyway. I give up. I just can't think of what the danger might be. Please enlighten us. -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115 +1-815-753-6940