Dan_Jacobson@ATT.COM (05/18/91)
>>>>> Regarding Re: Mangled Newsgroups line; elle@ellis.uchicago.edu (Ellen Keyne Seebacher) adds: Ellen> grweiss@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Gregory R Weiss) has crossposting trouble: >I tried changing the line to 'Newsgroups: rec.games.misc, rec.arts.sf-lovers' >to cross post. ...I got a message saying something like 'Malformed >Newsgroups line'. What should I do to crosspost correctly? Ellen> Leave out the space. Ellen> Newsgroups: group.blurfl,another.group,no.spaces.here Ellen> This is what's commonly known as a "that's-not-a-bug-that's-a-feature." it's odd that in e-mail and most other headers, a space or 2 is ok... but not in the "Newsgroups:" line. -- Dan_Jacobson@ATT.COM Naperville IL USA +1 708 979 6364
flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) (05/19/91)
>it's odd that in e-mail and most other headers, a space or 2 is ok... >but not in the "Newsgroups:" line. This has always been the case, in every version of news I've seen. It's decribed (rather poorly) in RFC-1036. I think this is one of the worse botches in the news system interface, but it's rather too late to change it now. Better to let everyone stumble over this once. Or maybe the posting-front-end should delete spaces in the Newsgroups line. Then we only have to deal with cross-confusion during the ten-year migration period ("Joe put spaces in and his worked, why doesn't mine?"). (You can't fix it in the news transmission software, because you'd have to fix it in everyone's news software, everywhere, which is quite unlikely.) -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu