From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Thu Sep 27 2001 - 15:08:02 CDT
On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 03:53:39PM -0400, Forrest J. Cavalier III wrote:
> > As for Clive's suggestion that we should now discuss cancels a little
> > more, I entirely agree. The simplest way to implement multiple cancels
> > would be to allow multiple message-ids in a single cancel message
> > (indeed Henry already implemented that in CNews in a fit of enthusiasm)
> > and it would hardly require rocket science to incorporate it into other
> > serving agents.
>
> Is this intended to be a reinvention of nocem?
In part, though nocem is still officially advisory, more of an attribute
that can be applied to an article. Indeed, a general solution to this
would in effect do that, be a tool to, with authentication, place an
attribute on an article, in theory to be stored in a database like the
history database or similar.
However, in practice, it might often be the case that the attribute
would be a recommendation for cancel, which would indeed be acted upon
immediately if the sender is trusted, and as such not really be stored
in a database.
In the future, one might imagine a system where some number of semi-trusted
parties has to issue a cancel recommendation for it to be acted upon.
However, at this point, I don't want to complicate matters so would not
push hard for the generalized design, though I tend to like them. However,
the format should be sufficiently generalized.
New the cancel/attribute message would, most reasonably, put the messages
it describes in the body, not in the header. Thus we would have a
"Control: authcancel" with a body. The body, perhaps in some mime-type,
would contain lines. Each line would include a message-ID, but also
support other attributes, in MIME syntax format.
Thus:
Control: authcancel
Content-type: application/messagelist (or whatever)
<foo@bar.com>; mode=cancel
<baz@foo.com>; mode=nocem; score=10
Or whatever else you wanted to add. The minimal implementation would
just do the cancel.
One could do a single cancel like this as well.
The design could also double up, so that the control header remains as
before, but if the message is signed, and the body is the right content-type,
the body is parsed.
Bulk on cancels is not an issue. Only about 1,000 solo cancels by article
authors are issued each day. The vast majority of cancels are by parties
other than the author, and usually done in bulk.