Autah-cs.164 net.news utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!utah-cs!lepreau Sat Jan 16 17:18:57 1982 Truncated Articles We frequently receive articles which appear to have been truncated, but one never knows for sure-- perhaps the sender just hit ^D accidently. These usually take the form of 0 line or 1 character articles. Now I KNOW truncation occurs, because we got a 0 line article for the first of Chris Kent's fixes to savecore.c (unless he sort of half caught his error!). Now, we don't run B news yet so perhaps something like this is already being done, but if not, here's a suggestion: Have inews/netnews append a distinctive string to the end of each message. It could be very short, even 1 character. The Arpa digests all do this and find it very useful in detecting transmission trouble, even on their considerably more robust network. Now I grant it might be mildly annoying, but perhaps readnews could look for it and only tell you if it were missing. It doesn't have to be a particularly special string-- very little harm comes from a string in the message duplicating it, as it's just a check. It's also (desirably) less sensitive than a char count preceding the message, which is too easily scrogged due to extremely minor corruption. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.