pag (04/25/83)
I don't know about 2.10, which very few sites have yet, but earlier versions of news make use of the 'f' followup mechanism cumbersome because it doesn't put you into an editor. I prefer to see people carefully composing their news with an editor than using followups which cannot be edited. The small gain of a "References" field is more than compensated for by ill-composed articles. --peter gross seismo!hao!pag hplabs!ucbvax!hao!pag decvax!brl-bmd!hao!pag
borman (04/30/83)
The claim was that the problem with the 'f' command was that it didn't
put you into an editor. Well, our site is running version 2.9 of News,
and if you have EDITOR defined in your environment (and exported...) to
the name of some editor, the 'f' command will place you into that editor.
In fact, I am using ex to compose this article. If people would read
the documentation, mayby they would discover nifty features like this.
If your news doesn't have this feature, get on the back of your local
administrator, because it has been available for at least a year!
-Dave Borman, {ihnp4|harpo}!stolaf!borman