mark@cbosgd.UUCP (11/10/83)
I'd like to thank all of you who responded to my previous query. The ideas were very helpful. I now have a related question: readnews 2.11 sorts messages, within a newsgroup, by discussion. This way, when several discussions are going on in a newsgroup at once, all messages within one discussion appear together. Or at least, as far as readnews can tell that two messages are in the same discussion. The followup command automatically provides this information, both by using the same subject, and by including a "references" line, mentioning the message of the original article. However, in using this interface, a problem has come up: lots (and I do mean LOTS) of people do not use the followup command. They manually post a message, often with a similar title (similar to humans, completely different to a machine), and of course with no references line. At least one good reason for doing this is when readnews -p is used to dump the news to a printer. People also like to have a cooling off time before the respond. There may be other reasons as well. The new postnews command already asks if the message being entered is in response to something else. If the user answers yes, it says to use the followup command. I'm sure you all realize how hard it is to find the original article, and then to get into readnews looking at that article. The typical response now is to run postnews again, but this time to lie and claim it's a new message. Somehow, postnews should figure out which article is it the user is following up, and insert the proper subject and references from it. The question is, how does the user say what message it is? Postnews could ask for the Messaeg-ID. A Message-ID looks like <1234@cbosgd.UUCP> and is usually not printed, although it is the only unambiguous way to refer to a message across machine boundaries. Or it could ask for the article number in the local newsgroup. This information will often not be available. Another thought is to list all the subjects stored on the machine and have the user pick one. The list could be pretty long for some newsgroups, and it's these newsgroups that need help the most. Another possibility might be to have the user type in the subject verbatim, and hunt for a matching subject. One I think I like is to have the user type in the first 2-3 words of the subject, and let the program go hunting. This is ambiguous if there are lots of followups (which message is this in response to), but it probably doesn't matter, since it's all the same discussion. I also am not sure what to do if it can't find a match, especially if the user does not have a listing of the subject handy. I would appreciate any suggestions. It's important to make this as easy as possible to use, because its use should be easy enough that people will not try to get around it. I'm sure this group can help. Mark