jim@tiamat.fsc.com (Jim O'Connor) (02/09/89)
I noticed an unexpected/unexplained behavior by inews/rnews when dealing with my comp.mail.maps newsgroups. Last night, several new map articles came into this system, but only one of them was forwarded to other sites. The only thing I have been able to detect that is different between the articles is that the one article which was forwarded did not have a "Supersedes:" header, while all of the other articles did. I recently rebuilt my history files due to re-compiling the news software to use the DBM flag and associated database routines. Are these two events related, and if so, how? Thanks for any help you can provide, --jim
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (03/09/91)
In article <00668200458@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) writes: >The real killer will be "inews". My code is currently just whipping up the >appropriate headers and tacking them onto my postings. It does none of >the fancy censorship etc. stuff of Unix "inews". Before I release my code >to the public, I'm going to have to do something about that. Not that it >really matters -- since the Amiga has no protection mechanisms... It still matters. Even on Unix it is fairly trivial to forge news. The point of inews's various bits of censorship is to keep stupidities from being propagated *accidentally*, either by out-and-out error or by naive users who simply don't know any better, and in general to deal with problems in a user-friendly way. (For an example of the latter, relaynews simply discards unapproved articles in moderated groups, while inews deals with the situation intelligently.) It's a user interface, not a protection system, and user interface is important. -- "But this *is* the simplified version | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology for the general public." -S. Harris | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry