🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <TOWFIQ.90Feb1105440@interlan.Interlan.COM> towfiq@interlan.Interlan.COM (Mark Towfigh) writes:
>As for "UUCP" signatures (most of us newsposters are on the Internet
>now), they *do* have a standard format (unless a user has
>underhandedly appended their signature to the end of their posting).
>This format is a "--" followed by a newline, and it is tacked on the
>posting by all standard newsposters before the signature.  Telling AWK
>to simply delete everything after this string is a 15-minute task.

It's true that postnews and Pnews usually tack on the .signature after
"--", but lots of people tend to use "--" separate sections of text so
you may be stripping out part of someones article.  The other important
point about .signature files is that they tend to contain useful
information such as reliable e-mail and real mail addresses, telephone
numbers, et cetera (I also agree that some of them are unnecessarily big
and contain fancy pictures, but hey, they're some times fun to look at :-)

The fidonet site commented that it was expensive to carry news that had
these .signature files, but it certainly is not any cheaper for UUCP
sites.  The Internet or UUCP sites transmission costs are not trivial by
any means.  I am sure that it costs just as much to UUCP news around as
it costs fidonet to transmit the news.  It is a lot of $$$ to uucp news
from uunet or from any long distance feed.

Possibly someone can maintain the gateway or posts digests.  The
maintainer can filter out all the junk that appears at the gateway
before forwarding it.  There are a lot of useless articles being
gatewayed to USENET from FIDONET in addition to the problems that USENET
poses to FIDONET operators.  Or we can do nothing :-)
-- 
Andy Toy, Mortice Kern Systems Inc.,       Internet: andy@mks.com
  35 King Street North, Waterloo,       UUCP: uunet!watmath!mks!andy
      Ontario, CANADA N2J 2W9      Phone: 519/884-2270  FAX: 519/884-8861