[arachne] Re: Arachne and NEWSNET

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 Stegozor <stegozor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi all,

> I finally managed to get Arachne work. One of the first
> things I tried was its news client, and I have some
> suggestions.

> First, note that Arachne puts only one Message ID in the
> References header. However, if the message to which an
> Arachne user is replying did not reach a given news server,
> the message sent by Arachne won't be included in the thread
> but will be considered as the first message of a new thread
> on this server. And given how USENET works, such things
> happen, fortunately rarely, but they do happen. Put
> differently, each message posted via Arachne will break a
> thread on some servers. Note that Lynx has exactly the same
> weakness. So, I think including up to say 3 or 5 headers
> would be nice, reducing the risk of breaking a thread by
> 99+%. ("I'm not sure if it was only in a draft, but I
> believe that the protocol requirement is to always retain
> the thread root and to maintain at least the most recent
> three, as well, but with a should level preference to
> retain all." quoted from Lynx mailing list.)

To be honest: I have never fully understood the threadmechanism.

RFC1036  2.2.5.References says:
  *  It is permissible to not include the entire previous "References"
  *  line if it is too long.  An attempt should be made to include a
  *  reasonable number of backwards references.

  I have fixed this problem.

> Second, I remarked that messages I posted (I couldn't type
> special French characters like
> included in the quoted part), with those French characters
> included the following headers:
> Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
> AFAIK, you just can't include those characters in 7bit
> encoding, you must use 8bit. Maybe a minor bug ?

You have to use 8-bit encoding.

> Third, I tried to use my cable ISP's news server which
> doesn't require any authentication. You just have to
> connect from their network. The problem seems that Arachne
> absolutely wants an authentication (but I may be wrong
> there). So I used my Teranews account which does require an
> authentication (login & password), and it worked fine. Is
> that normal?

Arachne should be able to login without username and passwort .

Maybe the file  'nntp.log' from subdirectory  'c:\arachn\news ' can
help to solve this problem.

> Finally, as a wish, it would be nice if Arachne
> automatically fetched a user defined number of messages for
> each group on the grouplist each time it comes online. That
> way, it would be an off-line newsreader (if this is already
> possible, I was unable to find how to do so), saving money
> for those who use non unlimited dial-up connections.

I thought this 'select out' mechanismus useful, as I don't like to be
flooded with a lot of unwanted 'blablabla' messages.
I will think about it.

> Sincerely.

     Werner Scholz

-- Written by a user of the Arachne Browser -
                         http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/

                  Arachne at FreeLists                  
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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