Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site pur-phy.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!CS-Mordred!Pucc-H:Physics:crl From: crl@pur-phy.UUCP (Charles LaBrec) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: A Thought on Newsgroup Structure (lo - (nf) Message-ID: <1176@pur-phy.UUCP> Date: Thu, 2-Feb-84 11:59:06 EST Article-I.D.: pur-phy.1176 Posted: Thu Feb 2 11:59:06 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 8-Feb-84 03:16:57 EST References: <5248@uiucdcs.UUCP> <819@hao.UUCP> Organization: Purdue University Physics Dept. Lines: 55 We ran notesfiles for about a year in conjuction with B news before I threw it out the door. While we liked the screen oriented behavior and index page, when vnews arrived we decided we liked that better for the reasons below: 1) minor point--some of us disliked the 'moded' command set 2) ver 1.3 on our 2.8 BSD PDP-11/44 constantly screwed up. net.sources had to be turned off because large articles trashed it completely. I had to 'adb' some notesfile index about once every other week to clear the NFINVALID bit. 3) My major gripe was, and still is, its basic incompatibility with the rest of USENET. At the time, it interfaced to news through an 'A' news interface. This meant no "References:" header for the rest of the net, and losing any other header except Article-Id, date, and path, and even then notesfiles would lose all of the path except for the tailing "site!user" 4) Its screen display was not very intelligent. At 300 baud, I couldn't stand it. Also, it was not possible to "fine-tune" the position of an article on the screen. What I mean is that both "readnews" (through "more") and "vnews" allow you to scroll the screen by one line, thus enabling someone's code fragment to fit on a screen. 5) Other nit-picky things like: subject limited to 30 (?) or so characters, no subject line in saved notes, not being able to save a note w/o a header line and a trailing "-------" (makes it a pain to grab things off net.sources and "sh" them), REQUIRING a mail router since path info is lost, not being able to use a simple "grep" to find something somewhere in notes (all notes in a group are kept in a single file that is read protected because of read/write access controls), and max note size of 64Kb (big problem for net.sources). I could probably go on, if I thought about it some more, but these are trivial dislikes. I guess I'll end this with a list of advantages: 1) the index page is good, except that it is almost useless when trying to scan for a few new responses in a mire of crap, since you couldn't tell which notes had new responses. (Of course, the sequencer knew, but you didn't want to see all the new stuff). 2) responses are kept together, along with their parent 3) it takes about 75% the disk space of news 4) it is possible to limit access to certain groups by user or group. The permissions are read/write/answer, where answer allows to enter a followup only, and not a new discussion. 5) each news group can be administered by a normal user, who can be given "director" access (a "super-user"-like permission list on the specific notesfile) 6) you can pick the order of presentation of news groups Charles LaBrec UUCP: pur-ee!Physics:crl, purdue!Physics:crl INTERNET: crl @ pur-phy.UUCP