ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) (02/12/84)
From Donn Terry: Orphaned responses are in general a symptom of news' occasional unreliability, not any problem of notes directly; you see the orphaned responses in reading news, it just isn't as visible that its an orphan. (How many times have you thought "I don't know what this is a respnse to". Usually one blames ones memory; with notes, you know that you aren't losing your mind, you havn't seen anything about it before!) The problem is that I may have very well seen something on the topic before, but because a notesfile system somewhere hadn't seen anything on the topic before it gave the article an "Orphaned response" title. If I don't recall what an article is a response to in vnews, I use the parent command to find out. I don't think that notesfile solves the "I don't know what this is a response to" problem unless the response is a response to a "base note". If you wanted to see the full text of Donn Terry's article you could search for articles by him, but I know of no automatic way of finding his article. I know that notesfile flattens discussions into lists in order to keep the user interface simple, but I think that discarding all traces of the original tree-like structure of the discussion is a mistake. On the other hand, the parent command doesn't work if the article came out of notesfile because notesfile doesn't use the References line. All right, the next release of vnews will attempt to determine the parent using the title. Although this is will be useful for newsgroups which are gatewayed to Arpanet mailing lists, it is largely another case of, "notefile doesn't interface with USENET properly, so I have to write additional code to pick up the pieces." Kenneth Almquist
suitti@pur-phy.UUCP (Stephen K. Uitti) (02/15/84)
First: Orphaned responses are in general a symptom of news' occasional unreliability, not any problem of notes directly; you see the Reply: The problem is that I may have very well seen something on the topic before, but because a notesfile system somewhere hadn't seen anything on the topic before it gave the article an "Orphaned response" title. My Reply: The problem with notes "orphaned response" has nothing to do (really) with grouping. Grouping is only good so that if you only bother reading news once a week then you can skip whole discussions and read with context (having just read something on the same subject). These are convenient. If an article doesn't contain enough context for what it replys to, it is unreadable anyway. I'm not about to try hunting down it's parent. The real problem with notes "orphaned response" is that you loose the subject line. GONE. You HAVE to read the article. I've run notes, it was no better for the guy who ran it than for the guy who ran news. Stephen Uitti (Purdue physics site manager) UUCP: pur-ee!Physics:suitti, purdue!Physics:suitti INTERNET: suitti @ pur-phy.UUCP
jlilien@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Joel Lilienkamp) (02/17/84)
It seems to me that this whole business of Orphaned Responses from notes could be fixed (based only on having used notes a long time ago and reading the long discussions on this over the passed few years) by changing the data structures slightly. My understanding is that currently notes creates an "empty template" for the base note if a response arrives before the original article. The Orphaned Response is put in because the subject line is not stored with the replies. Yet it is clear to me that there is other information associated with the response, such as who sent the response. Clearly, an extra field could be added to the response article's data structure to hold the subject, while still maintaining a pointer to the base note for discussion groupings. Over the net traffic could then get its subject directly instead of indirectly through the base note structure. This seems so easy an obvious, that I must be overlooking something. Please fill me in. Joel
witters@fluke.UUCP (John Witters) (02/21/84)
I have a simple solution to the problem. I don't read any articles with "Orphaned Response" in the subject line. I just hit "n" and skip right over the buggers. As far as I'm concerned, Notefile has a bug. I don't believe in cute signatures either. - John Witters
phil@amd70.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (02/23/84)
Hear hear! Boycott those nasty "orphaned responses"! For that matter,
how about those stupid truncated Subject: fields?
--
Phil Ngai (408) 988-7777 {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amd70!philberry@zehntel.UUCP (02/28/84)
#R:sdcrdcf:-84800:zinfandel:18300005:000:1836
zinfandel!berry Feb 21 08:13:00 1984
sdcrdcf!jlilien writes:
"It seems to me that this whole business of Orphaned
Responses from notes could be fixed... The Orphaned Response is
put in because the subject line is not stored with the replies.
... Clearly, an extra field could be added to the response
article's data structure to hold the subject,...
This seems so easy an obvious, that I must be overlooking some-
thing. Please fill me in."
OK, I'll repeat myself a little. I fixed the 'Orphaned Response'
problem (which is only a problem when interfacing with Usenet, BTW)
at least as much as I could at a single site. I posted the fix to
net.notes, but I might as well have sent it to /dev/null for all the
thanks I got.
An orphaned response is created in this way. A USENET article comes
in to a site running notes, and gets put into the notes system as a
'Base note'. Some user of the notes system decides to respond
('post a followup') and creates a response, which in due course gets
spit out into Usenet again.
Now there are two news 'articles': the original note and the
response. Somehow the response comes to another system running
notes WITHOUT the original 'base note'. It gets inserted as an
'orphaned response' although the original subject is still with it.
NOW, if a user at the second site responds to this note, the notes
system obligingliy spits the new, second response out into
USENET with the title 'Re: Orphaned Response - (nf)'.
When one of these comes in, there is no way to ever reconstruct the
title.
What I fixed was to keep the title intact, rather than change it to
'Orphaned Response'. The fix is quite simple, involving only
about 5 lines in the file 'newsinput.c'. I will be happy to send
details to anyone interested.
Berry Kercheval Zehntel Inc.
(ihnp4!zehntel!zinfandel!berry)
(415)932-6900