Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: "-- " and .signature
Message-ID: <2962@looking.UUCP>
Date: 17 Mar 89 05:08:16 GMT
References: <11273@s.ms.uky.edu> <10986@well.UUCP> <385@logicon.arpa>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 33

It may be your article and you want it to look the way you want it
to, but it's also bad manners.   Some people write software that
looks for a standard "signature" for the signature, so to speak.

After all, it's my header and I want it to look the way I want, so
I will change "newsgroups" to "newsfroups" in the header, right?
Clearly not.

USENET is for the readers, not for the posters, or so I feel.  News
posting software should do everything possible to classify articles
in recognizable ways so that readers can deal with them as they like.

If my newsreader kills signature lines, and you delete the -- in order
to get around it, that's just going to anger me and get your userid
put in my kill file, instead of just writing code to not show me
your signature.

You may argue back and forth about whether news posting programs should
enforce 4 line signatures or reject articles full of included text,
but if the posting programs don't enforce such rules, then the
information should still be there so the READING programs can enforce
the rules.

I suppose we should propose another header item.  We have "lines" that
gives the total lines in the article.  How about another item
called "text_lines" which indicates how many lines there are in the
main text of the article?

That way readers can always figure out the length of the article text,
the signature and the whole body.   And I can write a newsclip program
to reject articles with signatures longer than I like.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473