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From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed (part 1 of 2)
Message-ID: <1991May31.212656.22438@twinsun.com>
Date: 31 May 91 21:26:56 GMT
Sender: usenet@twinsun.com
Organization: Twin Sun, Inc
Lines: 27
Nntp-Posting-Host: ata

The recent brouhaha over C News's date parser has overlooked a useful
property of the current situation.  It's now possible to post an
article that targets only B News sites: just munge its ``Date:'' line
to be something acceptable to B News but not C News.  This gives a
control over article distribution that can be more useful than what the
``Distribution:'' line gives.

To take advantage of this opportunity, I've written a program
`bnewsonly' that munges ``Date:'' lines to be acceptable to B News but
not C News.  A companion program `cnewsonly' targets C News sites.  By
careful header formatting, these programs can even send articles only
to sites running particular software releases, e.g. just C News sites
running version 7-Sep-1990 or later.  This gives news transport authors
a new way to target their bug reports and upgrade reminders -- a
long-needed ability that would have helped to prevent the recent
uproar.

A Usenet administrator can install these programs inside the news
transport mechanism itself: when given an optional regular expression
argument, the programs munge only those articles whose subject lines
match the argument.  To demonstrate how this works, I'll install

	bnewsonly 'jokes being missed'

locally, and then post the programs' source code in part 2 of this
message.  Please look at the change in header lines between the two
parts of this message to see exactly how it works.