From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 16 1999 - 23:08:24 CDT
Brian McCauley <B.A.McCauley@bham.ac.uk> writes:
> But where is this written down? Draft-ietf-usefor-article-02 section
> 7.1 implies this but it does not come out and say it (because it's
> wrongly assumed that it should go without saying).
The general consensus of the working group seems to be that submissions
for moderated groups should be given a distinguished MIME type and
encapsulated in a MIME e-mail message. I'm with the general consensus on
this.
The current practice of putting the headers in with the mail headers seems
simple, but it's a false simplicity. It leads to munging of articles
(lots of mail servers rewrite From headers), means that moderators can't
know for sure that a message has been forwarded from a news server and
therefore has or should have well-formed news headers, and is essentially
impossible to standardize.
Encapsulating the message sounds like more work, but I really think that's
just during the transition. After that becomes the way to forward
submissions, all a moderator has to do is just strip off the first headers
entirely (possibly correcting for Content-Transfer-Encoding) and they're
left with a fully-formed proto-article, suitable for injection. This is
way easier than the ad hoc header trimming (with a lot of lossage) that we
have to do now. (I'm a newsgroup moderator as well.)
On top of that, the unwarranted chumminess between news and mail that
would be required for standardization of the current moderation forwarding
method would likely meet with opposition in the IETF, since the news
header standard and the mail header standard are not quite compatible.
Possibly not a problem for an informational RFC, but we're going for
standards track, which has to meet a higher quality.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>