From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 15:53:52 CST
"J.B. Moreno" <planb@newsreaders.com> writes:
> On 12/28/00 5:22 AM, Charles Lindsey at <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
> > In <20001226192253.2505.qmail@kairos.algonet.se>
> > sommar@algonet.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
> >> In passing, let me note that some people add a PS after the signature.
> >
> > And should be roundly flamed for having signatures of more than 4 lines :-( .
>
> And irrelevant besides -- I can put a PS in an X-PS header, but it shouldn't
> automatically be copied into the body of a followup.
>
> If the reader (person) sees it and wants to address it, then some extra
> steps (or at least different steps) have to be taken to make that possible,
> but that is no different than asking what the zip code is or who was the
> famous person that you are quoting in your sig was -- if the user wants to
> comment upon the sig then he can do so, just as he can comment upon your
> Organization header or anything else he wants to. But in neither case
> should it be automatically included as part of the quoted text.
The basic problem is that some posting agents includes the poster's
signature in the article, and the poster is free to add text whereever
he wants. Users who are unware of RFCs will of course add text as
they see fit.
And those days are long when Usenet was only used by techies who
you could bang in the head with an RFC and say "don't do that".
If we don't want text by accident after the signatures we must
specify how the posting agent is to handle the signature. Some
newsreaders, e.g. trn, silenty add the signature afterwards, so
if you want to add a PS, you have to edit your signature file.
If the newsreader author wants to permit the user to alter the signature
for a particular posting he can put the signature in a pain of its own.
But newsreaders that just put the signature at the end of the main
compose window, encourages use of PS:s.
So, either we discuss how to posting agents are to handle the poster's
signatures - or we leave it silent on follow-up agents are to handle
signatures in quoted articles.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se I'm not in love. It's not even a phase I'm going through.