bobvan (12/09/82)
Sitting out here at a site that doesn't run notesfiles, I see a lot of follow up articles making it into net.general that the readnews interface would have relegated to net.followup. The one that triggered this article is whuxlb.856: #R:brunix:-106300:whuxlb:400008:000:167 whuxlb!pfc Dec 9 08:33:00 1982 Hail to you Brown University. It's about time Rhode Island joined the net. Peter Caswell (an ex-(but in my heart still a) Rhode Islander) ...harpo!whuxlb!pfc It is bad enough that we have sites who post their new site announcement to the wrong newsgroup, but do the 7000+ people who read net.general care if this guy likes Brown U. and Rhode Island? Sorry, I don't mean to sound like a dreaded flamer. I do mean to make a suggestion, though. Notesfiles should be changed so that when notes are gatewayed into news, if the note is a response and if it is comming from net.general, then it should be posted to newsgroup net.followup. Similarly, on gatewaying news into notes, articles from newsgroup net.followup that were responses to net.general should be routed to the net.general notesfile. The simplest way to implement this would be to put a simple program in a pipeline between newsoutput and inews. A similar program would be needed in the pipe between news's sys file and newsinput. Each of these would probably be a 20 line C program -- no more than a page. The trouble is that this idea doesn't make reading news thru notesfiles any better (or worse), so it'll probably never get implemented by notesfiles users. Anyone volunteer? Bob Van Valzah (...!decvax!ittvax!tpdcvax!bobvan)