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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!mhuxn!mhuxr!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!rochester!cmu-cs-pt!cadre!psuvax1!dae
From: dae@psuvax1.UUCP (Daemon)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Format of moderated newsgroups
Message-ID: <1673@psuvax1.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 27-Jul-85 16:59:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: psuvax1.1673
Posted: Sat Jul 27 16:59:01 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Jul-85 00:47:08 EDT
Reply-To: dae@psuvax1.UUCP (Daemon)
Organization: Penn State Univ. Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 60
Summary: Make them more like news, less like digests

It seems to me that there is a clear conflict between the concepts of
digests and moderated news which has not been fully realized by some
moderators.

A digest, in my humble opinion, is a concatenation of mail received at
a given place, formatted somehow to split items, and containing some
sort of banner such as "Send complaints to x, submissions to y."  The
end user (reader) gets, then, a total of N + 1 headers to read, N being
the number of messages in that digest.

News, on the other hand, is closer to a packet-stream; a user is
theoretically supposed to be able to screen much of what s/he doesn't
want to read just by examining the headers of every given article.

The problem with this and current moderated newsgroups is that they
seem to be implemented as hugely-distributed digests, causing the
following problems:

(1) At least some mod groups seem to post every N articles that come in
    as a lump, whether or not they share a common topic.  This makes
    filtering very difficult.

(2) Most (I think all) mod groups have two sets of headers--the
    original author's and the moderator's.  They don't always
    match, causing confusion.  In addition, news software replies
    to the outermost (moderator's) headers, which is usually not
    quite what you want.  Yet further, the reader has N * 2 headers
    to read.

(3) Most (I think all) mod groups put posting instructions at the
    head or tail of every message.  I know most of them by heart.
    Am I alone in this, or is it frustrating, especially to people
    who read news over low- to medium-speed phone lines?

What am I proposing?  Quite simply, that moderated groups completely
drop all resemblances to digests and simply edit the headers of submitted
articles so that the original from, subject, date, etc lines are
preserved and Resent-date, Resent-from, and (if not already present)
Summary lines are added.  One other feature might be adding a
Followup-To: line with the moderator's address in it.

What does this mean?  Users reading moderated groups don't need to have
different behavior patterns for moderated and unmoderated groups.  In
other words, the Subject line reflects the subject of the article, the
>From line the author, etc.  In addition, the 'r' and 'f' commands will
behave as for other groups, replying to authors and posting news
respectively.

What about Arpa users?  Easy.  Just have a simple filter at the gateway
to drop the added headers, slap on a digest header containing the subject
lines, and concatenate the articles.

Comments to me; flames to /dev/null.
-- 
--Daemon

    How many DEC repairmen does it take to write a light bulb?
    17. 7 to write the light bulb, and 10 to call the IBM PC.

    [Generated by a random joke program.  I need say no more]