Autah-cs.164
net.news
utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!utah-cs!lepreau
Sat Jan 16 17:18:57 1982
Truncated Articles
We frequently receive articles which appear to have been truncated, but
one never knows for sure-- perhaps the sender just hit ^D accidently.
These usually take the form of 0 line or 1 character articles.  Now I
KNOW truncation occurs, because we got a 0 line article for the first
of Chris Kent's fixes to savecore.c (unless he sort of half caught his
error!).  Now, we don't run B news yet so perhaps something like this
is already being done, but if not, here's a suggestion:

Have inews/netnews append a distinctive string to the end of each message.

It could be very short, even 1 character.  The Arpa digests all do this
and find it very useful in detecting transmission trouble, even on
their considerably more robust network.  Now I grant it might be mildly
annoying, but perhaps readnews could look for it and only tell you if
it were missing.  It doesn't have to be a particularly special string--
very little harm comes from a string in the message duplicating it, as
it's just a check.  It's also (desirably) less sensitive than a char
count preceding the message, which is too easily scrogged due to
extremely minor corruption.