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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!zehntel!berry
From: berry@zehntel.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Re: Notesfile vs. USENET (flame) - (nf)
Message-ID: <1342@zehntel.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 28-Feb-84 04:41:12 EST
Article-I.D.: zehntel.1342
Posted: Tue Feb 28 04:41:12 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Mar-84 16:35:24 EST
Sender: berry@zehntel.UUCP
Organization: Zehntel Inc., Walnut Creek, CA
Lines: 46

#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