wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (05/23/84)
What determines the date formats displayed in the headings of news items? Some show a reasonable and usable form, such as: "Article 30 of 37, May 8 23:53" However, most show the day of the week, such as: "Article 446 of 477, Thu 00:45" (Actually, showing the time is also rather a waste, but somebody must have wanted it to show up, so it can be ignored, I guess...) With the delays in USENET transmission, and the fact that sometimes you lag behind in reading news postings, the "day of the week" form is fairly useless for any reasonable purpose. The "actual date" form is much to be preferred. Can the "actual date" form be made standard and universal in future releases of netnews software? Is this determined by the software of the poster, or by that of the reader? Will
allyn@sdcsvax.UUCP (Allyn Fratkin) (05/24/84)
I agree with this. I was very annoyed when 2.10 news came out and it had
this annoying habit of printing just the day for dates in the last week.
Personally, I would much rather see the day and date *all the time*.
--
From the virtual mind of Allyn Fratkin sdcsvax!allyn@Nosc
UCSD Pascal Project {ucbvax, decvax, ihnp4}
U.C. San Diego !sdcsvax!allynbarmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (05/25/84)
I noticed the fact that readnews sometimes shows a full date and sometimes just a day of the week back when I first started reading news. I never asked anyone about it, but I have always assumed that it only showed the full date if it was posted within the previous week. Thus, "Thu" means "this past Thursday". I like this idea, because it mimics the way I think about dates. Unfortunately, I don't think vnews, which I use now, does this; it always shows the full date. -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar
fair@dual.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (05/26/84)
The date shown at the top is the posting date of the article, in the
timezone of the poster. So you can see if the poor person was up late
at night composing his reply. This article, for example is being posted
on Friday May 25th, 1984, at 5:15 pm. The date shown by news should
reflect that.
Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucb-arpa.ARPA
dual!fair@Berkeley.ARPA
{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!fair
Dual Systems Corporation, Berkeley, Californiadebray@sbcs.UUCP (Saumya Debray) (05/30/84)
After removing superfluous gunk from the header: > From: fair@dual.UUCP > Newsgroups: net.news > Subject: Re: Dates in news headings > Message-ID: <537@dual.UUCP> > Date: Fri, 25-May-84 20:14:36 EDT > Posted: Fri May 25 20:14:36 1984 > > The date shown at the top is the posting date of the article, > in the timezone of the poster. So you can see if the poor person > was up late at night composing his reply. This article, for > example is being posted on Friday May 25th, 1984, at 5:15 pm. The > date shown by news should reflect that. Well, it doesn't! (Note, though, that 5:15 p.m. is about the same time as 20:14:36 EDT, the time in the header. Does that mean that the time in the header is the time in *the reader's time-zone* corresponding to the time of posting of the article? If so, of what use is it?) -- Saumya Debray, SUNY at Stony Brook uucp: {cbosgd, decvax, ihnp4, mcvax, cmcl2}!philabs \ {amd70, akgua, decwrl, utzoo}!allegra > !sbcs!debray {teklabs, hp-pcd, metheus}!ogcvax / CSNet: debray@suny-sbcs@CSNet-Relay
seifert@ihuxl.UUCP (D.A. Seifert) (05/31/84)
I find the date in the header very useful when a batch of old news
gets dumped out by mistake. (by bug?) Just glance at the month
and day and 'n' away. The time-of-day part doesn't seem to be
useful.
--
_____
/_____\ That auto-crossing beagle,
/_______\ Snoopy
|___| BMWCCA, Windy City Chapter
____|___|_____ ihnp4!ihuxl!seifertosd@hou2d.UUCP (Orlando Sotomayor-Diaz) (05/31/84)
Excuse me if this has been discussed before, but,
Why some articles were posted in the future? (According to
the Date-posted field in the message header.)
--
Orlando Sotomayor-Diaz /AT&T Bell Laboratories, Crawfords Corner Road
/Holmdel, New Jersey, 07733 (Room 3M 325)
Tel: 201-949-1532 /UUCP: {{{ucbvax,decvax}!}{ihnp4,harpo}!}hou2d!osddonn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (06/01/84)
From: debray@sbcs.UUCP Date: Tue, 29-May-84 22:51:29 PDT Date-Received: Thu, 31-May-84 18:04:02 PDT Does that mean that the time in the header is the time in *the reader's time-zone* corresponding to the time of posting of the article? If so, of what use is it?) In case you were wondering, this symptom is part of the reason for the existence of the notorious time warp bug in B news (fixed by Jim McGinness, decvax!jmcg). B news ALWAYS converts date fields into an internal format when it receives an article, causing the time zone information to disappear. When you read an article, the time zone in the date fields is your own. This means that the date information in an article header is useless for determining the longitude of the poster or the local time the article was posted. It DOES give you an idea of how long the article took to get to your site. Actually I would rather not have the date fields interpreted... I can't imagine how not interpreting the dates would break anything. What do the B news maintainers think of this? I didn't REALLY post this article at 3:20 in the morning, Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) (06/04/84)
Eric said that the time on top of the article reflects
the time the author wrote it *in his timezone*. Clearly,
this is not the case at our site. Every timestamp gets converted
to european time.
If I read clear nonsense, and I see that it was produced at 4pm,
I know that I can safely ignore it, so I would prefer seeing the
submission time in it's own timezone.
Jack, {philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jackrh@mit-eddie.UUCP (Randy Haskins) (06/05/84)
Speaking of time warps, every once in a while I will see a date that is something like a week away (forward) from the current date. Anyone care to speculate what causes this? -- Randwulf (Randy Haskins); Path= genrad!mit-eddie!rh