Re: #1029: USEFOR 3.2.2 References: Should comments be a MUST NOT? (fwd)

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <42C4A56D.2010503@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "Forrest J. Cavalier III" <forrest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>5. Agents MAY remove comments from References.

Aaarrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhh! No!

It is a fundamental principle of everything we have done that agents do
NOT change articles in transit. Usenet is a distributed database, and we
want a given article to the the same (modulo variant headers) wherever it
it stored.

There is a limited provision for injecting agents to "mend" things that
are incomplete (and we spent a lot of time a few years back reaching a
consensus on exactly how "limited" that was to be).

I don't really think this one is a good candidate even for that, though.

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