Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tytso From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software Message-ID: <11320@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Date: 11 May 89 02:39:54 GMT References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <29126@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <3229@looking.UUCP> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 61 You seem to be suggesting mandatory standards for what software people run on machines. And traditionally, that has gone over as well as cold fusion within the MIT Physics department. :-) Now then, exactly how much do we lose if a references line is broken? Well, that one article becomes treated as a base note, and thus must be killed off if the object is to remove all articles on a thread. If the object is to follow a line of discussion, all a single broken reference chain does is to break the chain into two parts. OK, this is annoying. But that's all. What's this about broken chains being so horrible? Once the inet mailling list <--> news gateways are discounted, it would seem that the number of non-compliant sites aren't that high. I don't see this as such a horrible problem. Then again, there's the problem that it is impossible (as in halting problem impossible) to determine whether an article is ``supposed'' to be a reply to another article or not. That is, there is no real difference between a reply to an article and a basenote which can be detected by the News software. In fact, someone might claim that their article "deserved" to be considered a basenote instead of a followup to this huge unmanageable chain, so it might be debatable even using Human arbiters. For example, if you implement and deploy your "enforcer" to send horrible flaming mail to everyone. I predict it won't be long before people who want to post articles via mail or who want to protect people's RN from blowing up in their faces to change "re:" to "F*ck_Brad:"...... and thus a new outlet for people's imaginations would be developed, much like the line-eater fodders. :-) >We are spending many megabytes storing and shipping these lines after all. Let's see.... we're currently keeping 27,088 articles (expire time = 14 days), and at an average of 80 characters of reference information per article, this works out to 2 meg of information, which might seem like a lot, until you realize that the two weeks of news consumes 144 meg of disk space. That is to say the references comsumes all of 1.38% of my News storage. Oh... pain.... agony..... :-) Personally, I'm not going to worry about it. > 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. Define: ultimate parent --- I know what you mean, but define it in a way that the News software can know about it. *I'd* have a hell of time finding the ID of the ultimate parent of any given subject line. One thing I'd like to know: are you currently using a hypertext reader? If you aren't, how can you be sure it would be so horrible? If you are, I suspect that some of your problems may be stemming from a deficiency of the reader instead of inherent problems with the status quo. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Theodore Ts'o bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso 3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139 tytso@athena.mit.edu Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!