From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 03 1997 - 04:27:37 CST
kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) wrote:
>OTOH, I don't think there really is any technical justification left even
>for this rule. Limit total newsgroup name length to 255, and leave it at
>that, would be my preferred solution.
No, you can't do that, because a line in the newsgroups file is already
expected to fit within 79 characters.
>As for allowed characters, it might make sense to forbid all-numeric
>components, as those make problems for a lot of existing implementations
>(like C-News and INN), plus all those fixed strings that have been used
>differently.
Yes, I could change the syntax to:
Newsgroups-content = newsgroup-name *( ng-delim newsgroup-name )
newsgroup-name = *FWS component *( "." component ) *FWS
component = component-start *13component-rest
component-start = lowercase
lowercase = <all letters not designated as
upper case in any character set>
component-rest = ( lowercase / digit ) / "+" / "-" / "_"
ng-delim = ","
However, there already exists a whole family of alt.2600.* groups (quite
active I believe). Also
alt.266
alt.atari.2600
alt.collecting.8-track-tapes
alt.comedy.slapstick.3-stooges
alt.music.311alt.music.4-track
alt.religion.christian.20-something
alt.svens.house.of.12.year-old.lust
alt.tv.90210
Do we want to outlaw all those? Henry allowed them.
>Anything else should only be cases of obvious potential for
>harm, which essentially reduces to some specific ASCII characters like
>":%/&*?" (exact set TBD, but think "URL syntax" and "special shell
>characters". No non-ASCII characters should be on that list, and certainly
>not ASCII upper case. Leave that to hierarchy-specific rules.
No, the last thing we want is ugly punctuation in the middle of newsgroup
names. In fact, I suggested removing "_" from the set, but nobody
responded. There currently exist just a few alt groups and one bionet
group with "_" in them. I reckon they could be fixed.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------- Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5