this is not the ietf-nntp list referred to above.
My apologies for that. They indeed went to the ietf-nntp list (you can
find them there on http://lists.eyrie.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-nntp). But
they were inadvertently posted to this list also. I still regard the
ietf-nntp as the proper forum for this discussion.
As some of you know, I read these various lists by gatewaying them into
local newsgroups. So my replies looked like followups, and hence were
gatewayed into both lists. But worse, following newsgroups practice,
having seen them in my local.nntp group they were not visible in my
local.usefor :-( .