From: Denis McKeon (DMckeon@swcp.com)
Date: Tue Jun 11 2002 - 01:38:30 CDT
In <3D02DCED.3F8718E6@americasm97.nt.com>,
"Chris Lewis" <clewis@pte.nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
...
>It just put the article, as constructed by Pnews/inews/nntpd, into the
>body of the message - the news headers were just more text.
I'm hearing a nominal total of 3 methods "in the wild":
1) "double" headers - news headers within an e-mail body - now very rare.
2) merged e-mail & news headers - currently most commonly seen.
3) MIME-encapsulated news - news headers within a MIME part.
and would suggest that a rational approach for script/robot writers
would be to support 2) now and for as long as that legacy is with us
(probably around 2010 or so?) and to support 3) as soon as feasible.
That implies (IMHO) that USEFOR should require (MUST) support of 2) and
encourage (SHOULD) support of 3).
>Much as a full bore mime-ish solution would be nice, I'm in Russ' camp,
>but more so - by enshrining a standard such as this, particularly with
>any major decoding requirements, a lot of moderators with primitive
>tools (and no facilities to use anything better) are going to have a
>massive problem when they start receiving such posts. Think: "moderator
>on AOL" where they have problems just inserting Approved lines.
>
>This may lead to the evolution of multi-group stump-like servers would
>fill the gap. But, I'm not convinced that even that will have
>sufficient penetration. If you go encapsulation, I feel that you're
>more likely to be successful with formats/protocols that already exist,
>and manageable with standard tools (Outlook, gag..., etc), not new
>formats or protocols.
I wonder if a market might arise for moderator support services, similar
to services now being offered by 3rd party spam filtering services -
people maintaining servers that would receive submissions for moderated
groups, perhaps filter out spam, do whatever pre-mangling or unmangling
is required for their customer-moderator's situations, and pass along
the result, perhaps tagged for various in-folders, to the actual
moderator(s).
Filtering according to group policy or group charter could also be done,
optionally, but I don't see out-sourcing *all* moderator decisions - just
those that a human moderator might delegate to their own scripts/robots.
Since most existing groups are likely to keep running whatever robot,
script, or process the moderators have developed over time, I would
never expect to see a sudden move to a single centralized moderation
support service, but would also caution against any effort to migrate
all moderated newsgroups to use *a single service* - not only would it
be better to have a few competing services, but I think that net news
users would probably be suspicious of, or at least concerned about, any
movement that tended to concentrate moderated newsgroup traffic through
one single bottleneck.
Hmmh - for that matter, perhaps moderation support services might also
fill a different niche - anything an existing moderation
robot/script/human can't handle is forwarded to a service, which tries
to un-mangle it, and sends it back for another pass - less intrusion
into the existing process, and less chance of loss of content.
(But yes, a risk of mail loops, and a chance that messages might come
back more mangled rather than less, but still perhaps an improvement for
those "moderators with primitive tools".)
-- Denis McKeon