Re: Sorry for the FAQ posting

On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 14:56:54 +1200, Matthew Thomas (mpt...@spamfree.land) wrote:
: Posting the FAQ with the same message-id each time is a nice idea in
: theory, but in practice there'd be two problems: (1) you'd confuse the
: hell out of Usenet readers which said `what the hey, there's two
: messages here with the same message-id! that's impossible!', and (2) you
: would need to be deeply, intimately, involved with the internal workings
: of your NNTP server in order to override the normal consecutive
: message-id numbering.

Point one is valid, though in theory at least the newsreaders should
simply assume that the post has been duplicated somehow and ignore the new
copy. A more significant problem might be that newsservers may make the
same assumption and drop the new post, leading to propagation problems.

However, nothing should be easier than using a custom message-id. Just add
one to the headers, and the NNTP server should see that there's already
one and let it be[1]. See headers of this post for an example.

For the FAQ problem, a more appropriate solution might be to use the
Supersedes header, as in:

Message-Id: <a.a...@my.host.name>
Supersedes: <a.a...@my.host.name>

where the Id in the second header is that of the previous FAQ post. Note
that this won't stop the FAQ from reappearing each week, but it will stop
several unread FAQs from accumulating if you don't read the group for a
while.

[1] I know it works for me, at least when posting with telnet. YMMV.

-- 
<-- Ilmari Karonen --><-- http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/ --><-- ilt...@sci.fi -->
"I am a student at UC Berkeley, and I am taking this class where we have to
go to a news group and ask an "intelligent question"."  -- a luser in a.a-a

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