vxl5382@acf4.UUCP (05/20/84)
Recently, the was a discussion in one of the newsgroups regarding the necess- ity of the bug-killer first lines. The end results were that people are not sure if the bug is still around. I, for one, have no doubts. Four of the mes- sages I read today were completely blank (of course, there were respnses to some very interesting points in the messages, of which I could decipher no- thing.) I want to ask every one out there who wants people to actually read his/her messages to use the bug-killer lines. Thanks (What did he say?)
dyer@vaxuum.DEC (Example #22) (05/22/84)
Re: The Bug Lives______________________________________________________________
[ If this line is eaten; and nobody sees it; was it ever really here? ]
There's been some confusion lately about what the bug is. It looks
like a number of people just put it in without knowing why.
The bug works as follows: If your first line begins with whitespace,
some sites (with old software) will chomp up some, most, or all of your ar-
ticle. This I know because the very first article I sent got chomped. I
started it with a tab.
The two workarounds I've seen for it is (1) leave the first line of
your article blank, and (2) put a throwaway line in as your first line (making
sure that there's no whitespace in front of *it*).
There seems to be an idea floating around that the first line some-
times gets eaten, and that's why it's put there. Is that true? I've never
seen the line *not* there, but then again, how could I?
<_Jym_>
...{allegra,decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-vaxuum!dyerpaul@osu-dbs.UUCP (Paul Placeway) (05/23/84)
[grrr.] The *SOLUTION* to the problem is *NOT* to have people but a bug line as the first, but to UPDATE YOUR NEWS. If you think that you can't, you arn't trying hard enough 8-). "I even like the chicken if Paul W. Placeway the sauce is not too blue..." The Ohio State University (UUCP: cbosgd!osu-dbs!paul) (CSNet: paul@ohio-state)
stv@qantel.UUCP (Steve Vance) (05/24/84)
[..]
It might be a good idea to mail a copy of any message that gets
crunched back to the author. If one person from each site did
this, the author could possibly tell by triangulation which
site(s) had this bug. That is, sites downwind of the buggy site
would mail to the author, and those between the author and the
buggy site would not. The author of the crunched message could
then post a notice telling everyone who to avoid as a relay site.
Or perhaps just mail a note to the feeder site(s) of the
offending site(s), suggesting that news be routed around the
offending site until their news software is updated.
Steve Vance
{ucbvax,ihnp4,amd70,zehntel,onyx}!dual!qantel!stv
Qantel Corporation, Hayward, CAbytebug@pertec.UUCP (roger long) (05/25/84)
Well, it would have been helpful if you had posted the headers to the messages so that we could try to trace the bug back to it's origin and get rid of it. That would be a *LOT* more helpful instead of encouraging everyone to add N more characters to each and every message they generate. Just think about how much those N bytes cost after being propagated across the entire country