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From: hal@cornell.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Subject: Articles out of order still
Message-ID: <4534@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Jun-83 17:59:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.4534
Posted: Thu Jun  2 17:59:56 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Jun-83 02:39:28 EDT
Sender: hal@cornell.UUCP
Organization: Cornell Computer Science
Lines: 31

It seems that the out-of-order article problem is as bad as ever.  For
instance, a sequence of 4 consecutive articles in net.religion have the
following posting dates:

	May 12 13:34
	May  5 20:41
	May  3 11:11
	May  4 14:47

This has come up in the past, but is apparently no closer to a solution now
than before (we are running 2.10 news).  The problem is that news displays
articles in the order they are received (in sequence by article number),
which, given the nature of this network, doesn't have any particular
relation to the order in which the articles are posted.

There is a simple solution (at least it's trivial to describe, although the
implementation may be nasty depending on how the news software is constructed-
I'm not a wizard at this so I wouldn't know).  Just sort the articles by the
date/time they were posted, and display them in that order!  This would at
least guarantee that followups are displayed after the original articles.

This certainly doesn't guarantee that related articles are displayed
together, or other desirable things, but it is a start and would be most
appreciated.

Hal Perkins

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