Xref: utzoo news.software.b:7936 news.admin:14610 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!axion!delluk!holly!tim From: tim@dell.co.uk (Tim Wright) Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: Date: 24 May 91 11:04:53 GMT References: <28357D59.17BB@tct.com> Sender: usenet@delluk.uucp (Usenet posting login) Organization: Dell Computer Corp., Bracknell, UK Lines: 42 In mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) writes: >chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes: >> Administrators who get "bogus header" messages and don't pass them on >> deserve flamage. >Unfortunately, it seems there are quite a few sites out there whose system >administrators have better things to do with their time than read the log >files and send mail messages to people whose articles have been junked. You don't need to read the log files. I take it you do have access to awk, cron and mail. It can't be that hard to put together a small summarising script to mail you, can it ?? Quite a few sites conversely do take the time. >As a general principle, it is unwise to design software in such a way that it >relies on system administrators being conscientious individuals. Perhaps you'd care to mention that to Ritchie, Thompson et.al. some time. (1/2 :-) One of the biggest obstacles to improving usenet over time has been the problem of shoddy software. Whilst it is regrettable that some sites lost some articles, it was quite amazing to see how quickly the volume of bad articles dropped. Do you really expect the shell to magically rescue you if you type 'rm -rf *' as root ? Why then should the news transport try to fix up your mistakes. As has been pointed out, there is no reliable way to do this which may not break other conforming software. If you really spend hours preparing articles, surely you can spend 30 seconds verifying the validity of your headers. Novice users should not go around editing headers anyway unless they have read the specs and deserve to have their articles dropped if they don't. The only sympathy I can have is if someone is using common and supposedly correct news software and finds that it is generating bad headers. I do not believe that there have been many/any examples of this. I would welcome counterexamples. Tim -- Tim Wright, Dell Computer Corp., Bracknell | Domain: tim@dell.co.uk Berkshire, UK, RG12 1RW. Tel: +44-344-860456 | Uucp: ...!ukc!delluk!tim Smoke me a Kipper, I'll be back for breakfast - Red Dwarf