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From: chongo@nsc.UUCP (Landon Noll)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: References:, and the E (eradicate) readnews key
Message-ID: <606@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Feb-84 02:20:18 EST
Article-I.D.: nsc.606
Posted: Mon Feb 13 02:20:18 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Feb-84 23:32:46 EST
Organization: National Semiconductor, Sunnyvale
Lines: 23

after some study, i found that when i went through net.followup, i
spend time 'n'-ing follow-ups to dull subjects such as what does the
word foo mean?  (DONT ASK!!!)  of the 30 articles posted one day,
28 of them were References to subjects i already 'n'-ed!  (the other
2 new articles were 'n'-ed too...)

what i am thinking of building as an E key.  when you E and article,
readnews will automatically 'n' any articles which Reference the E-ed
article.  if folks were encouraged to put the Reference line in the news
header message, as most of them do now, then this method would work better.

readnews would need to keep a per-newsgroup database of eradicated topics.
References which were not hit for say 14 days (i.e., subject died off) would
be automatically removed from the database.

Q:
	- is the Reference field a good indicator, or should some system
	  also keep track of the subject and look for Re: foo subjects?
	  (i think not)
	- what method of storing/fetching the eradication info be used?
	- has this been done, or planned to be done soon?

chongo  /\EE/\