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Acbosgd.116 net.general,net.news utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Sat Oct 10 11:23:54 1981 plato and USENET Since the proper place for this topic is net.news, I suggest that future comments on it be posted to net.news only.

The software running at UIUC for netnews is presumably version A, where all the news comes out in the exact order received. Having all the newsgroups interspersed is indeed annoying to the reader.

Version B, which is very near release and running at several test sites now, prints news one newsgroup at a time, and within that newsgroup, news is printed in the order received. This is not as good as what Plato is described to do (sorting first on newsgroup, then on the specific topic, then by time) but it's a far cry better than version A in this respect.

Such a sub-sort sounds useful, but it does not sound all that easy to implement. I see two problems:

(1) How do you do the sort in the first place? I think this can be solved, since the list of articles to read is kept around as that newsgroup is read (I think) it would be possible to sort on the title, ignoring an initial "Re: ". I'm not completely sure about this - Matt Glickman can comment on the internals of readnews and suggest whether it is feasible.

(2) How do you tell what's a followup to what? The "followup" command is one way, but what if someone doesn't use it? The facts of life are that 80% of the news on USENET comes in fa groups from the arpanet, and they don't adhere to any particular convention in this regard. Sometimes the subject is the same, or has an extra "Re: " at the front. Sometimes they sent fresh mail with a hand entered subject. In the case of digests, the moderators pack everything together and there's no reasonable way to have a machine take it apart. (There are many people, not including myself, who feel that the digest format is much more convenient for large volume newsgroups.) It is also the case that due to network delays, sometimes a response gets posted before the original query.

This is a situation where a meta-no (but a different kind than Peter Kessler was suggesting) would be useful. You could sort of "un-subscribe" to a sub-topic by saying "no!" and it would remember that you didn't want that sub-topic, but did want future ordinary things. It would also be useful to be able to say "what was this all about again?" and get the original query reprinted. Both of these sound awfully hard to implement, and will probably never happen.

Mark Horton

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