Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!poly-vlsi!scoob From: scoob@vlsi.polymtl.ca (Scoob) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: LET'S NAME THE GUILTY POSTING SOFTWARE!!! Message-ID: <1991Jun19.144257.9466@vlsi.polymtl.ca> Date: 19 Jun 91 14:42:57 GMT References: <1991Jun15.194129.25394@vlsi.polymtl.ca> <285E730F.4EC0@tct.com> <6068@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> Sender: news@vlsi.polymtl.ca (USENET News System) Organization: Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal Lines: 76 In article <6068@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber) writes: >In article <285E730F.4EC0@tct.com> chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes: >>Neither rn nor trn guarantees that the article it generates is valid. [...] > >The responsibility for validating the headers should be the software that >posts the software into the system. If the headers are not valid, then the >posting software should generate an error message immediately. The posting >software for the systems I am familiar with is called inews. It is called >by user posting front-ends such as Pnews and postnews. Well I guess we're home free now since Stan JUST happens to maintain BOTH rn (Pnews) and nntp(mini-inews) };-) > >Unfortunately, some news transports spool posted articles for later >processing by the posting software. In this case, the poster may not >know the article had invalid header lines. Pnews (which we use with trrn) does NOT spool posted articles for later processing. Mini-inews (a mini nntp front end to inews) simply drops bad articles on the floor silently (***Sounds familiar***) and terminates as if everything was OK. This behavior is VERY anoying. >An analog with mail is that the mail transfer agent validates the headers >and returns the mail if headers are invalid. The user agent (which might >just be a text editor) may or may not have any such checking. This is as >it should be. > >As far as I know, news transports don't have the "mailer-daemon" feature >of mail. I think there has been some discussion of this elsewhere. Hopefully, >something this useful will find its way into today's news transports to >help deal with this problem. Stan, my friend, YOU HAVE THE POWER to do this. (BUT you probably don't have the time :-<) The mail feedback solution IS possible in this case. We all understand that the mail feedback is NOT reasonnable in the case of the news sites flooding each other with bad article mails but here we can efficiently use this method. As mentionned in Stan's posting, the mail system does it succesfully **WHAT ARE WE WAITNIG FOR**. If I recall correctly from the mini-inews README file, the guy who wrote it was saying something like: "It's a very slim subset of inews but don't bother me for more features. It works like that and it stays like that". Well it was a bit anoying in the past but now that Cnews deciced NOT to be forgiving anymoure it would be nice to get a feed back from mini-inews on weither or not the article was posted correctly. If one tries to post a bobus news from a CNEWS site, it simply won't get to the local news spool. Hence a way to find out if your posting was valid (still not very friendly...). The poor guy at a BNEWS site can only find out by calling a friend at a CNEWS site and ask him to check for his posting (definitly NOT friendly). Stan, how hard would it be to build a mail feedback mechanisim for mini-inews? (Common errors include a typo in a newsgroup name). If a modificaiton to mini-inews is too much work or inews itself doesn't provide feedback (like ok it passed or NO it's rejected), maybe a Perl header checker called from Pnews or something along those lines. How much work is involved in checking for a header validity? BTW: Stan: Thanks a lot for the effort you put in supporting those software. In those days of flaming authors I think a little path on the back is in order. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Christian Marcotte scoob@vlsi.polymtl.ca Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal tel: (514) 340-4476 Laboratoire de recherche en VLSI ---------------------------------------------------------------------------