Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!news From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Dealing with "Followup-To:" in RN Summary: I'm so confused... Message-ID: <1990Feb3.222514.435@athena.mit.edu> Date: 3 Feb 90 22:25:14 GMT Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Organization: Northeastern University Lines: 65 Occasionally, someone will include a "Followup-To:" line in the header of their article, indicating that further discussion of the subject should be done in a different newsgroup. I have two questions about this, one technical and one in re nettiquette. Nettiquette first: To what degree should I feel bound to respect the poster's wishes? To cite an example, if someone posts an article in misc.legal in re the legalization of some drugs, and includes a "Followup-To: alt.drugs" in it, am I obliged to honor that followup pointer, or is it all right for me to (arbitrarily) decide that the topic _does_ belong in misc.legal? Secondly, a technical question. What I want to do is to set up my NEWSHEADER environment variable such that if a difference exists between the name of the current newsgroup(s) and the name of the followup newsgroup(s), it will be very visible to me. The default NEWSHEADER, which I'm using now, includes Newsgroups: %(%F=^$?%C:%F) which, if I understand this right, translates to IF %F is a null THEN use %C ELSE use %F where %F is the string on the Followup-To line and %C is the current newsgroup name (btw, what's %C equal to if the article being followed-up is x-posted to several newsgroups?). Okay, so far, so good. What I want to do is to alter that part of my NEWSHEADER line so that the result will translate to IF %F is a null THEN use %C ELSE IF %F equals %C THEN use %C ELSE use something really eye-catching which contains both %C and %F I tried changing that part of my NEWSHEADER to Newsgroups: %(%F=^$?%C:%(%F=%C?%C:---- %C ---- %F)) The idea being that a "Newsgroups" line which contained all those dashes would leap out at me when I was editing my followup article and thereby notify me that the original poster had wanted to move the conversation to a different location. Well, it didn't work. I'm not sure why, but when I was following up article that didn't have Followup-To lines in them, I'd wind up with something like Newsgroups: ---- misc.legal ---- misc.legal which seems to indicate, against all reason, that the %F value is simultaneously (a) not null, (b) eyeball-visibly identical to %C and (c) not really identical to %C. Rather than try to believe six impossible things before breakfast, I've defaulted to assuming that I don't really know what the heck I'm doing. Can anybody help? -- William December Starr