[net.news.b] Articles out of order still

hal@cornell.UUCP (06/03/83)

It seems that the out-of-order article problem is as bad as ever.  For
instance, a sequence of 4 consecutive articles in net.religion have the
following posting dates:

	May 12 13:34
	May  5 20:41
	May  3 11:11
	May  4 14:47

This has come up in the past, but is apparently no closer to a solution now
than before (we are running 2.10 news).  The problem is that news displays
articles in the order they are received (in sequence by article number),
which, given the nature of this network, doesn't have any particular
relation to the order in which the articles are posted.

There is a simple solution (at least it's trivial to describe, although the
implementation may be nasty depending on how the news software is constructed-
I'm not a wizard at this so I wouldn't know).  Just sort the articles by the
date/time they were posted, and display them in that order!  This would at
least guarantee that followups are displayed after the original articles.

This certainly doesn't guarantee that related articles are displayed
together, or other desirable things, but it is a start and would be most
appreciated.

Hal Perkins

uucp:  {decvax|vax135|...}!cornell!hal
arpa:  hal@cornell
bitnet:hal@crnlcs

jim@uw-beaver.UUCP (06/03/83)

The following appears in the wishlist file in the news 2.10
distribution:

This is a list of features that probably would be nice but
that nobody has had time to do.  4/25/83

...

	Discussions should be detected and grouped
	together; it should be possible to shut off a discussion.
	(The newsgroups will be sorted by topic and date in 2.11 - this
	feature has recently been implemented but is far too new and buggy
	to put in the distribution.)