🚀 go-pugleaf

(note: this is posted to bit.admin and bit.listserv.netnws-l, with
followups directed to bit.admin - DMS)

There's a real storm brewing over in news.admin.misc (primarily) in the
thread "Re: Do something about missing References: headers".

Basically what's being proposed is trashing  "non-rfc-compliant"
articles.  In theory, it could make much of bit.* go away, and also
e-mail gateways into other newsgroups as well (the inet groups, for
example).

RFC 1036 (and son-of-1036, which is in the works) expect that all
followup articles (ie Subject starts with "Re:") contain a legitimate
References: header.  An article CAN be rejected as non-compliant if the
Subject begins with "Re:" and there is no References: header.  People
are calling for this requirement to be enforced, regardless of what
it does to e-mail gateways, FIDOnet, and the like.

Many e-mail gateways don't create References: headers, although in some
cases sufficient information to do so is in the In-Reply-To header.
The people pushing this RFC compliance are expecting that everyone will
"fix" their gateways, under threat of their articles disappearing
otherwise.

If a new release of C-News or INN (the two most popular usenet server
software packages) implements checking for this RFC compliance, then
articles will stop the first time they hit a news-server that's
configured to drop these articles.

-- 
Doug Sewell (doug@cc.ysu.edu) (http://cc.ysu.edu/1/doug)

"... where does *less* oppression fit into Judge not." (D. Owen Rowley)