In a message written on Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 05:32:56PM -0800, Russ Allbery
wrote:
No, they're not; in fact, the exact opposite is true. Personal experience
speaking there. Usenet moderators on the whole are the most likely to
still be using software that was written in the early 1990s, because they
have a disproportionate representation of old Unix hackers.
Ok, I'll admit I don't have all the facts, but I don't see how this
situation can exist with what has been proposed.
If news is UTF-8, raw, there must be some mechanism to e-mail that
content to a moderator, have them be able to read it at least well
enough to decide how to moderate it, and then be able to send it
back in some format that preserves the content with their additional
approval (which most likely implies UTF-something).
I would love to hear how if news is UTF-8 that could be done round trip
allowing all existing software to work. It seems like a complete
impossibility to me.
If anything, my proposal I think would make it easier. I can imagine,
for instance, a moderation gateway sending out:
multipart/mixed
- text/plain
"This is a message you must moderate."
- multipart/alternative
-text/plain
"All US-ASCII characters extracted from the UTF-8 message."
-message/rfcM
UTF-8 message in base64
So now, Mr Still Runs SunOS on a 3/80 gets a message that he can tell
he has to moderate (first text/plain part), can probably mostly read
(since Mr 3/80 is so in the past, he almost must speak US-ASCII, so
it is extremely unlikely he's moderating a foreign language group)
in the text/plain section. Finally, he can copy back the message/rfcM
part in a new outgoing message, something you can even do with awk/sed
with limited tallent (or say perl, with readily availble MIME library,
etc).
Indeed, this would allow someone moderating a mostly english newsgroup
to preserve things like "From:" lines with foreign language characters
never needing a mailer/terminal understanding UTF-8 or any of those
foreign characters. He can moderate based on the text/plain content,
in english.
Does he need a new "approve" script to pipe the message to in order to
make this work? Sure. However I submit it would be relatively trivial
to write such a thing in /bin/sh or perl, and if someone did just that
with the same calling conventions as the existing scripts they would
probably happly install it and use it glad they never need to know about
UTF-8.
Meanwhile, those who need UTF-8 can upgrade to mailers that display
all the characters they need to have newsgroups in their native language
moderated in the native language.
IMHO moderation is broken anyway, because it must go to e-mail and back.
Moderation should be built into NNTP, that is a command should be added
like:
"MODERATE my.group mypassword"
At which point the server shows you all submitted but not yet moderated
article. They could then be moderated with:
"MODERATE my.group <article-number> mypassword"
Triggered by something in the news client software. Again, newsreaders
would have to be updated -- but if the group is set on UTF-8 that's a
given anyway and it would get rid news<->mail issues for moderation
once and for all.
A huge oversight in the original NNTP protocol, IMHO.
--
Leo Bicknell - bicknell(_at_)ufp(_dot_)org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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