Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!ucsd!celit!billd
From: billd@fps.com (Bill Davidson)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: automatically mailing warnings about dropped news to originators
Message-ID: <18525@celit.fps.com>
Date: 18 Jun 91 03:40:29 GMT
References: <34587746@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <1991Jun10.225052.19739@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991Jun16.154834.114@corpane.uucp>
Organization: FPS Computing Inc., San Diego CA
Lines: 69

In article <34587746@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
>An unparsable date (which might something as innocuous as a new time
>zone) does not intrinsically cripple the article, as a bad Message-ID
>does for instance....

>In <1991Jun10.225052.19739@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Unfortunately, it does, because it might be a garbled version of a stale
>date.  A parsable date is a non-negotiable requirement.  (Incidentally,
>a new timezone abbreviation does not make the date unparsable, if I'm
>remembering the code correctly.)

In article <1991Jun16.154834.114@corpane.uucp> herman@corpane.uucp (Harry Herman) writes:
>Since dates are important, then have C-News recogonize the date formats
>that really exist on the net, not according to what a piece of paper says
>they should look like.

I disagree but that's irrelevant.  I saw something that over 50% of
college students cheat in some way.  Does that make it acceptable
just because it's common practice?

>Work with the writers of other news systems to get them to write new code
>to match that piece of paper.  Then, when 99.9% of the news postings
>match the peice of paper, then CONSIDER dropping the "obsolete" support.
>Although it would not really be obsolete until there are 0 posts with the
>old format.

Guess what Harry?  It's already happened!  Yes it really has.  The vast
extreme overwhelming majority of sites are Bnews and Cnews and guess
what?  They generate proper dates.  In general, on these systems, the
date is generated by inews.

>One of the recent releases of the nn news reader claims to have changed its
>code that splits digests into separate articles to handle both the "standard"
>format, and a particular news group's "non-standard" digest format.  The
>writer of nn did not say "Group x's digests are incorrect so we will
>ignore it", the writer essentially said "we will support what is actually
>out there".

That's a reader; not transport software.  Readers are meant to please
people.  Transport software is not for people.  Its purpose is to
transport the software as efficiently and reliably as possible.  Bad
headers, and kludges to deal with them jeapordize both.  Readers are
supposed to make sure that things get from the transport software to
the users and vice-versa.  If your reader does that job poorly that's
not my problem.

>I am a user of news, I am not a system administrator or a news administrator,
>so I have zero choice in what operating system we use or what news transport,
>and am highly offended at an earlier posting that was along the lines of
>use Unix and C-News if you want to use news.  There are other operating
>systems out there, and there are other news transports out there.  If we
>are truly going to have an international network for sharing information,
>then all the people writing the software that makes this happen have to
>decide to work together and work with what is out there.  Add new features,
>but don't break existing features with a we are right and the rest of
>the world is wrong attitude.

People not running news on something UNIXish make up an incredibly
small minority of the news sites.  The RFC's have been around quite a
while now.  There's been lots of time for the admins to fix it.  It is
possible for a normal user to bitch at the admin to fix things.  Most
admins will let a lot of things slide until someone complains.

The vast majority of the net should not be punished because people
running news on a few Atari ST's are having their articles dropped.
The people whose articles are getting dropped are at a very small
minority of sites (probably less than 1000).

--Bill Davidson