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From: fair@ucbvax.ARPA (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Subject: Re: new algorithm for expire (and other things)
Message-ID: <9963@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 17-Aug-85 18:50:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.9963
Posted: Sat Aug 17 18:50:18 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 06:13:32 EDT
References: <554@down.FUN>
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 68

I think that this is an excellent idea. Among the other things, we
could eliminate the horrendous business of including the previous
article in a followup article, because that article would still be
online everywhere else, if the discussion was current. (if it wasn't
why are you kicking a dead dog, anyway?)

Do you think you can find the necessary, uh `volunteer', graduate or
undergraduate labor this fall, Peter?

While that is being done, it might also be nice to have rnews construct
a database from the `References:' header line.  You end up with a tree
that way:
                        base
                        /|\
                       / | \
                     r1  r2 r3
                    / \     /|\
                 r1.1 r1.2 / | \
                          /  |  \
                      r3.1  r3.2 r3.3

and so on. We can use rnews and expire to maintain this database.

The three prevalent user-interfaces (readnews, vnews, and rn) should
use it for presentation ordering, such that on each responses level,
the articles are presented in the order they were originally posted
(chronologically). When you have exhausted one level, you go on to the
next level (responses to responses), and so on.

Some nice things fall out of having this functionality:

ordering
	You actually get the conversation in the order in which it
	occurred, rather than in the order it arrived on your machine.

change of Subject:
	You can change the subject line to reflect the current content
	of the article you're posting, without worrying that no one will
	find it (things will relate by `References:', not this primitive
	`search for the same subject' junk).

response restriction
	``You haven't read everything currently online related to this
	  subject/topic, do you really want to followup now, no doubt to
	  give the same response that 100 other people did?''

no more inclusion of previous articles
	Why include when your readers can all just pop back up the tree
	and re-read the thing you responded to?

killing a discussion
	Given that people do change the subject lines, you can kill an
	entire discussion easily, including responses that have
	completely different subject lines. Alternately, you can ask
	your user interface to kill all the articles with the identical
	subject line, but stop when the subject changes (indicating a
	shift in the conversation, presumably).

Larry Wall (rn), Kenneth Almquist (vnews), are you listening?

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU

P.S.	Peter, I re-read the DRAGONMAIL paper. When I first heard it at
	SLC USENIX, it sounded, well, like a version of netnews for mail.
	Now I see the wisdom of the thing, and wish I had a copy to
	deal with my 50-100 letters per day... Larry Peterson is at U of
	Arizona, busily working on version 2, according to his response
	to my status query.