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From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software
Message-ID: <3180@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 10 May 89 17:01:07 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 28

In article <3222@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>Recently I wrote some software to make use of the References line in news
>articles.  Much to my dismay, I found that most articles don't have a valid
>References: line!   The reason is a small number of sites with broken posting
>programs that don't include a References: line on followups.  I scanned
>65,000 news articles, and 3700 of them matched this expression:
>
>	if( !followup && subject has "^re:" )
>		-- bad article --

Brad, you're jumping to conclusions based on a couple of incorrect assumptions.
First, an article doesn't have to be a followup if its subject matches "^re:".
Secondly, many articles enter the network via mail-to-news gateways.  For
example, the #2 spot on your list, Berkeley, is the major gateway for
converting the Arpa mailing lists to and from newsgroups.  Obviously
they can't magically concoct reference lines in most cases.

>If we can't fix this problem, we will just have to abandon the References:
>line and all the useful things that can be done with it.  (Like USENET
>hypertext threads etc.)

We do not.  Just treat articles with no references line as basenotes.
Gateways can also make a better attempt to generate References: headers
from In-Reply-To headers where they exist.

Obviously, no one has deliberately broken postnews and Pnews.
-- 
-- Joe Buck	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck