stan@teltone.UUCP () (01/14/84)
I haven't seen anybody report this one yet: vnews can prevent an article from being to shown to you, even though you're a subscriber to one of the newsgroups in the article's list. Suppose you're reading net.auto and an article with the newsgroup list "or.general,net.auto" comes up. Vnews will skip it! And since we don't have an "or.general" group vnews will never show the article to me. (Note that if net.auto had been first on the list, the article would have been shown to me.) I didn't look into the problem that much, but there is a fix. The function which is used to decide whether to display the article to the user is rightgroup(), near the end of the main source file visual.c. I just made a quick fix by making rightgroup() always return 1. A couple people have already posted vnews mod's that change the code in rightgroup(). However, those mod's have no effect on the above mentioned bug. I don't even think the bug is worth fixing, except in the way mentioned above (return 1). I would much rather have every article in a newsgroup be displayed to me rather than having the news program try to be smart about which articles are displayed and then make a mistake. For example, suppose I subscribe to net.jobs and net.wanted and somebody posts an article with both groups on the newsgroup list. But also suppose I don't read net.wanted all the time, in fact maybe I'm way behind reading it. That means I want the article to always be displayed when reading net.jobs. The order the newsgroups are in on the Newsgroups: line and the order the newsgroups are in in the 'active' file would always play a part in the decision of when to display it, so smart software would make the wrong decision sometimes. Anybody agree with me on the last point, or disagree?
jr@taurus.UUCP (01/20/84)
I don't know if (a) it's available in the public domain, or (b) it's been posted recently, but I'm interested in a copy of the VNEWS interface if possible. If anyone has any leads, or can send me a source, could you please do so via mail, as net.sources doesn't come across the Atlantic. -- ++jim <england>!ukc!hirst1!taurus!jr ++jim