OT: Please, do not use the alternative "Web-News" interface to post messages

[Oskar Linde]

This may be a bit nitpicky, but since there is an increasing problem, I 
feel it deserves mention.

Lately, I noticed a number of posts that break threads. They all have 
the user agent string:

Web-News v.1.6.3 (by Terence Yim)

which must be the alternative interface at
http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php

Posting with this interfaces results in posts that violates at least
five de facto rules documented in mail and news related RFCs:

1. (This is the most serious, as it breaks threading) Generated replies
do not contain the required "References" and "In-Reply-To" header
fields. Thunderbird seems to fall back on some heuristic. In other
readers, the threads simply break. (Ironically, even Web-News fails
to thread it's own messages...?) (RFC1036 says '[When replying, ] the 
"References" line is required')

2. A space is placed after the quote character (>) even when the next
character is a quote, breaking quoting more than one level deep. 
(RFC3676 states that a space before a '>' at the start of a line means 
that the '>' should be treated literally as a '>' character and not as a 
quoting marker. This is called "space stuffing".)

3. Messages are posted as 8-bit without any charset specification. This 
is hardly a good practice and not within any standard.

4. More seriously, some message headers (From and Subject) are generated 
with non-ASCII characters (no charset or mime compliant encoding is 
used) (Violates RFC(2)822 and extensions)

5. Long lines are not broken at 78 characters or less. (Violates RFC3676 
and recommended practice)

The regular newsgroup interface (PHP News Reader v2.6.4) does a much
better job. It includes a correct "References" header field (but no
In-Reply-To field, which could be considered superfluous), and marks the
8bit body with a specified charset. It also breaks lines at < 78 chars, 
albeit with some problems.

The PHP News Reader succeeds at 1, 3 and 5 above (but still fails at 2 
and 4).

So, please post using the official web interface or using a proper news 
reader.

(I've become aware of the above while implementing proper Mime and 
charset handling for what became a quick and dirty nntp reader:

http://www.csc.kth.se/~ol/news/

I believe it decodes and parses most messages ok now.

I'll hopefully get some time soon to implement a posting interface that 
at least doesn't fail in any of the above ways. Shouldn't be too hard.)

/Oskar