Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!ukecc!vnend From: vnend@engr.uky.edu (D. V. W. James) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Wish List re: Crossposting Message-ID: <2400@ukecc.engr.uky.edu> Date: 2 Jun 88 00:53:48 GMT Article-I.D.: ukecc.2400 References: <439@bacchus.DEC.COM> <52859@sun.uucp> <9879@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6075@sigi.Colorado.EDU> <1107@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <9297@e.ms. 2 Jun 88 00:53:48 GMT Reply-To: vnend@engr.uky.edu (D. V. W. James) Followup-To: news.misc Organization: Univ. of KY Engineering Computing Center Lines: 40 I've been following the crossposting discussion for a while and what I have missed on the net david@ms.uky.edu has been keeping me up to date on (more or less.) Last night we were talking about it again and I had a thought that he suggests is pass on to the net. From person experiance I know that while a first posting that is cross- posted has some (perhaps deviant) logic behind its crossposting, the follow-ups and flames usually don't. So why not fix this part of the loop? Have the newsreader send a line to the posting program (inews in most cases), telling it what newsgroup the person is generating the follow up from. Have the posting program add a new line to the header in the article, something along the lines of Original newsgroups: soc.foo,comp.bar,... and a news- groups line that only has in it the group being read. This format allows the followup to still be cross posted, *but the poster has to think to do it!* If no change is made by the poster then the article is posted to only one newsgroup. If further groups are desired then the poster can A) delete the newsgroups line and change the Original Newsgroup line to be the current newsgroup line ( the situation that we have now) or can add a smaller subset of the newsgroups manually. Either way we force the poster to *think* about what he or she is doing. This should eliminate accidental crosspostings, and to some extent limit cross-posted followups all together. David thinks that this would require about 5 lines of code to need to added to rn, and slightly more but simular amounts to other newsreaders, and a short awk script to strip out the 'original news...' line before posting. Maximum benefit for what sounds like a minor cost. Does this sound like what people could use? -- Later y'all, {vnend@engr, cn0001dj@ukcc, mc.david@ukpr}.uky.edu; Vnend. And, (if I read it before it expires) VNEND on GEnie Ignorance is the Mother of Adventure. and, {any vertibrae}!ukma!ukecc!vnend R.A.H. So long, and thanks for all the books.