From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 05 2000 - 17:03:44 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Filtering is not a perfect art, so a few misses are to be expected.
> In practice, ISPs are not going to be inserting comments in stupid
> places, so filtering on
> Injector-Info:.*posting-host="?..."?
> will work often enough to be useful.
It would be nice if we could improve the current situation rather than
making it worse by replacing it with something less reliable than we have
now.
> I don't see why that makes it worthless. If the "posting-host" parameter
> is present and is useful, then use it. If that is not useful (because of
> too many false positives) then an additional "identity" or "user"
> parameter might provide additional filtering possibilities.
> The main thing is to make sure that each parameter has a simple and well
> understood syntax that is easily parsed. Trying to cram everything into
> one parameter just makes parsing more difficult.
I'm not arguing that we should cram everything into one parameter. I'm
arguing that we should add an additional parameter which has the same
semantics as NNTP-Posting-Host, namely "if we're choosing to provide any
data that may be useful for filtering, this parameter will be present and
you can use it as a black box of data to filter on." This is what we have
with NNTP-Posting-Host now, and I think we should provide a parameter with
the same semantics.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>