Xref: utzoo news.admin:15310 news.software.b:8308 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: Date: 17 Jun 91 16:18:58 GMT References: <1991Jun14.044639.16135@alembic.acs.com> Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK. Lines: 46 csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes: > Malformed articles can cause > problems for the entire net. The Cnews patches help reduce those > problems. This is A Good Thing. It helps solve the problem. The Problem is that there is buggy software. The C News silent-article-dropping does nothing to solve the problem, it merely hides the problem from the rest of the net. I'm suggesting error-reporting because that would actually treat the cause of the problem, rather than the symptoms. > So, yes, you suffered. > Most unfortunate. But not a reason for the rest of the net to revert > to having to deal with spasms of ancient news articles, nor for us > to have to deal with the possibility of floods e-mail notices to sites > generating bad headers. NOBODY IS SUGGESTING FLOODS OF E-MAIL. NOBODY IS SUGGESTING ALLOWING OLD NEWS TO PROPOGATE. I don't know, the same old strawman arguments YET AGAIN. Are you trying to bore me into submission? > There is a certain amount of effort going on right now to find a > reasonable way to do this. As yet, no one has found a way that is both > guaranteed to return an error report and also guaranteed not to flood > the net with them. Firstly, is any effort being expended on fixing the problem? Henry seems to have gone silent on the entire issue. Secondly, no method is "guaranteed" to return an error report. It's a matter of implementing a method which is reasonably likely to succeed. I believe that news-based error reports with a modified message-ID are an adequate and safe solution; they are likely to get to the site or gateway sending out the duff articles, and they will not flood the net. If anyone has any objections to such a system, please would he voice them, as I've not seen any proper objections yet. mathew