Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software
Message-ID: <3229@looking.UUCP>
Date: 10 May 89 16:52:53 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <29126@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 47

Many people have responded to tell me the reasons for bad References lines.
Such reasons include:
	Gatewayed mailing lists
	mail aliases that post news
	Manual deletion of the references line by the user

I understand and already knew about these reasons.  They are not the point.
We either have to fix almost all the problems, or the References line is
useless and might as well be scrapped.

We are spending many megabytes storing and shipping these lines after all.

Gateways of mailing lists & moderated groups can be tolerated to a degree,
because they limit the problem to a single group.  Other problems can't
be tolerated.  If that means shutting off mail->news gateways, that's what
it means.

Right now, and until the problem is fixed at 99.5% or more of sites, you
can't follow a usenet discussion by references thread, the way you would like
to.  You have to rely on the subject staying the same.  That's stupid, because
often the topic wanders and the subject should change with it.

Worse, you can't kill a followup tree, because if you kill on an article
with a broken chain, you only kill the broken chain, and even if you kill
on the parent article, the broken chains keep showing up again, and again,
and again.

Any plans for a hypertext-like system have to be scrapped.  Such plans were
the motive for News 3.0, for example.

So I think we may have to do the following:

	a) No mail->news gateways.  You wanna post, get some posting
	   software on your machine.  It's only fair if you're going to
	   post to 10,000 machines.
	b) Otherwise get some very smart gateway software that can figure
	   out a references line
	c) Posting software should detect when the References line has been
	   edited out of a posting, and re-insert a shortened line that at
	   least includes the ultimate parent (original article) and the
	   immediate parent.
	d) Non-unix sites running new software must be required to adhere to
	   the standard.

Or give up.  Which would be sad.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473