) (05/20/91)
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: > In article <swT423w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) w [ Talking about C News ] > >It loses articles unnecessarily, without reporting its delivery failure to > >the originator. > > > >I call that broken. > > I don't. Good work, Henry and Geoff, in improving quality. "Improving quality"? I spend sometimes *literally hours* writing stuff to post to Usenet, stuff which I know people like to read and which I get fan mail for, C News throws all that away silently because of a missing comma in the news header, and you tell me it's "improving quality"? What the hell kind of quality improvement is that? You may not like my postings; you may not even read the newsgroups I generally post in. But to say that silently throwing away everything I write is a "quality improvement" is grossly offensive. I didn't see alt.flame in the newsgroups line. > In principle, email is person to person communication. Getting the message > through is therefore the principle. Adherence to exact standards is not > as important (as long as this does not cause system problems), as getting the > message to its destination. Sender and recipient can have their own private > arguments about standards. (No debates about this here, please. This is > a forum on news software). > > News, on the other hand, is public, not private. It is in some sense, a fo > of publication. Any failure to observe standards is an imposition on the > general public, so the publisher (in this case the news software, under > supervision of the administrator), has a higher obligation to maintain > accepted standards. This is truly bizarre. You seem to be saying that the form of publication of news is more important than its content. C News silently discarding articles with bad headers is like a newspaper silently discarding letters and other correspondence which have the date missing, and only publishing things which agree with their own standards for spelling, punctuation and layout. I'm adding comp.infosystems and comp.groupware to the newsgroups line, because I'm sure they'll be interested in your opinions. (I'm not being sarcastic, by the way.) mathew
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) (05/21/91)
In article <RP39225w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) writes: >> I don't. Good work, Henry and Geoff, in improving quality. > >"Improving quality"? > >I spend sometimes *literally hours* writing stuff to post to Usenet, stuff >which I know people like to read and which I get fan mail for, C News throws >all that away silently because of a missing comma in the news header, and you >tell me it's "improving quality"? If your articles are all that valuable, you surely kept a copy, and can repost. >What the hell kind of quality improvement is that? The "quality improvement" means that the next time someond drops 10 megabytes of really stale news on the net, I won't have to waste a lot of time trying to scrub it out of my tight disk space. Who knows? With the time I save, maybe I will have more time left over to read your posting. If the price I pay is to occasionally miss a current article with a syntactically invalid date, it is price well worth paying. >You may not like my postings; you may not even read the newsgroups I >generally post in. But to say that silently throwing away everything I write >is a "quality improvement" is grossly offensive. I didn't see alt.flame in >the newsgroups line. I was referring to the quality of the news software, not the quality of news articles. I have not seen any improvement in the latter. >This is truly bizarre. You seem to be saying that the form of publication of >news is more important than its content. If you want to describe it that way. I happen to think that some of the headers are part of the content. I'll tell you what! Why don't you set up an alternate news system where all the processing is done manually. Since a human is involved, syntactic errors can more easily be corrected. In any case, since it is not automated, there will be no software dependence on the exact form of the headers, so you can do what you like with them. I bet that the propogation with this manual system will be far poorer than with an automated system. If you want the benefits of automation, you have to live with some of the imposed rigidity. -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science <rickert@cs.niu.edu> Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115 +1-815-753-6940
kucharsk@solbourne.com (William Kucharski) (05/21/91)
In article <RP39225w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) writes: >C News silently discarding articles with bad headers is like a newspaper >silently discarding letters and other correspondence which have the date >missing, and only publishing things which agree with their own standards for >spelling, punctuation and layout. But most newspapers do reject letters and other correspondence missing a phone number. What's the solution if you want the letter published? Read the box in the editorial section stating what that newspaper's requirements are for publication of your letter. What's the solution if you what your news article published? You and/or the author of your news software should read the RFC. -- | William Kucharski, Solbourne Computer, Inc. | Opinions expressed above | Internet: kucharsk@Solbourne.COM | are MINE alone, not those | uucp: ...!{boulder,sun,uunet}!stan!kucharsk | of Solbourne... | Snail Mail: 1900 Pike Road, Longmont, CO 80501 | "It's Night 9 With D2 Dave!"