Autah-cs.164
net.news
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!utah-cs!lepreau
Sat Jan 16 17:18:57 1982
Truncated Articles
We frequently receive articles which appear to have been truncated, but
one never knows for sure-- perhaps the sender just hit ^D accidently.
These usually take the form of 0 line or 1 character articles. Now I
KNOW truncation occurs, because we got a 0 line article for the first
of Chris Kent's fixes to savecore.c (unless he sort of half caught his
error!). Now, we don't run B news yet so perhaps something like this
is already being done, but if not, here's a suggestion:
Have inews/netnews append a distinctive string to the end of each message.
It could be very short, even 1 character. The Arpa digests all do this
and find it very useful in detecting transmission trouble, even on
their considerably more robust network. Now I grant it might be mildly
annoying, but perhaps readnews could look for it and only tell you if
it were missing. It doesn't have to be a particularly special string--
very little harm comes from a string in the message duplicating it, as
it's just a check. It's also (desirably) less sensitive than a char
count preceding the message, which is too easily scrogged due to
extremely minor corruption.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <
[email protected]>
of
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
This Usenet Oldnews Archive
article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:
1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.
2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
