Stripped BB shell threads - options?

David Damerell said:

quoting Bill Sornson <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

David Damerell said:

No. The fact that OE interprets a line starting "begin" followed by
2 spaces as an attachment makes the newsreader crappy.

But no one /naturally/ posts like that!

Oh, well, that's all right then, isn't it? Why should anyone go to the
work of handling any wellformed article - like non-crappy newsreaders
do - when we can just confine ourselves to the things we think people
probably will post? That'd be a lot less work!

You're right -- MS should have considered every strange sequence of
keystrokes possible and developed endless code to defeat those evil people
who want to post ineffectively.

Quoted message said:

Remember that this problem is merely the most obvious symptom of the
numerous bugs Microsoft have introduced by this idiotic attempt to
infer document types by wild guesses about their contents.

Quoted message said:

Umm, look at YOUR post (the one to which I'm replying); it's pretty
mangled itself!

No, it isn't. It's a perfectly normal piece of interspersed quoting
(unlike your exercise in quoting the whole article unedited, which
used to be the common bad quoting format before top-posting). What do
you suppose is wrong with it?

You chopped off quotes mid-paragraph and generally garbled the content. Not
surprising, given your grim determination to keep readers in the dark.

I've come up with a workable solution: keep posting your "strange blank
attachment thingy" entries, and it there's something worthy of a reply then
someone will do so and thus the rest of us will see /some/ of what you wrote
(just what the respondent CHOOSES to show us).

Clear as a California mudslide...
--
BS (no, really)

Bill Sornson said:

Patrick Lamb said:

Bill Sornson said:

David Damerell wrote:

>The difference is that his format is wrong. There's nothing wrong
>with mine; the bug is in your crappy newsreader.

I still maintain that the vast majority of people use OE -- after
all it comes standard on the vast majority of machines nowadays --
and it works perfectly for 99.99% of the posts *I* read, at least.
(Sensible threading, easy formatting, etc. Granted I *am* using OE
w/Quote Fix. Now if THAT is why your posts are being stripped, then
I take it all back.) The fact that you are deliberately using a
trick to make OE see your posts as attachments doesn't make the
newsreader crappy; it simply means you're a self-defeating
curmudgeon (or something 🙂 ).

Bill,

Have you written Microsoft to file a bug report? That's clearly what
needs to happen here. David, for whatever reason, has a legal quoting
style that your OE won't easily read. It's a bug in the product
you're using. You, as the user, should complain to your vendor to get
that product fixed.

A "legal posting style"??? If there were numerous people whose entries I
couldn't access, then perhaps I'd be bothered. As it is, Mr. DamnItAll is
the sole queer duck.

"Legal" meaning "in conformance with relevant RFCs." I mean, we're
talking about the difference between preference (how do you want a
responder to quote) and a software bug (OE doesn't handle input
properly). If you're upset enough to make multiple posts about an
option, surely you care enough to let your software provider know its
product has a bug, right?

Pat

quoting Bill Sornson <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

David Damerell said:

quoting Bill Sornson <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

But no one /naturally/ posts like that!

Oh, well, that's all right then, isn't it? Why should anyone go to the
work of handling any wellformed article - like non-crappy newsreaders
do - when we can just confine ourselves to the things we think people
probably will post? That'd be a lot less work!

You're right -- MS should have considered every strange sequence of
keystrokes possible and developed endless code to defeat those evil people
who want to post ineffectively.

In fact, although you are attempting sarcasm, you are approaching the
truth.

Any competently written newsreader handles any possible article body
gracefully; it's not necessary, of course, to develop endless code or
consider every strange sequence of keystrokes possible, but merely to
avoid leaping to wild inferences based on article bodies, instead simply
displaying them to the reader.

What you don't seem to understand is that Microsoft _have_ considered
strange sequence of keystrokes and developed endless code. The behaviour
my articles trigger is not unintentional or unforseen; it's the result of
a deliberate decision to look for this string and infer from it that an
uuencoded attachment follows.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

No, it isn't. It's a perfectly normal piece of interspersed quoting
(unlike your exercise in quoting the whole article unedited, which
used to be the common bad quoting format before top-posting). What do
you suppose is wrong with it?

You chopped off quotes mid-paragraph and generally garbled the content.

Remember that ordinarily the quoted text serves only to provide context.
It's desirable that the new text be closely linked with the quoted text
it references, which may necessitate chopping paragraphs in half, and that
unnecessary quoted text be excised where possible, to keep the article's
size to a minimum.

Quoted message said:

I've come up with a workable solution: keep posting your "strange blank
attachment thingy" entries, and it there's something worthy of a reply then
someone will do so and thus the rest of us will see /some/ of what you wrote
(just what the respondent CHOOSES to show us).

That's up to you, but it might be a better idea to get a real newsreader
before one of the more serious bugs in MSOE trips you up.
--
David Damerell <[email hidden]> flcl?
Today is Second Oneiros, January.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:56:41 -0600, Pat Lamb
<[email hidden]> wrote:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

If you're upset enough to make multiple posts about an
option, surely you care enough to let your software provider know its
product has a bug, right?

Pat

Dear Pat,

Amusingly, a number of people politely asked David to remove
a silly bug that he is deliberately adding to booby-trap his
posts.

Given his refusal to fix his own posts, it's hilarious that
he is stamping his little foot at Microsoft and demanding
that they remove what they consider a useful improvement.

Carl Fogel

On 12 Jan 2005 18:27:37 +0000 (GMT), David Damerell
<[email hidden]> wrote:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

That's up to you, but it might be a better idea to get a real newsreader
before one of the more serious bugs in MSOE trips you up.

Dear David,

Oh, God, the sky is falling!

Millions tripped up by Outlook Express--men, women, and
children unable to read crucial newsgroup posts in which
"begin" is followed by two strange spaces!

Tony Blair denies UK involvement, but doubts remain!

UN forces deploying real newsreaders in desperate attempt to
save the injured!

Bill Sornson listed among the missing!

More as this story develops . . .

Chicken Little

David Damerell said:

quoting Bill Sornson <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

David Damerell wrote:

{of my calling his quoting style garbled}

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

No, it isn't. It's a perfectly normal piece of interspersed quoting
(unlike your exercise in quoting the whole article unedited, which
used to be the common bad quoting format before top-posting). What
do you suppose is wrong with it?

You chopped off quotes mid-paragraph and generally garbled the
content.

Remember that ordinarily the quoted text serves only to provide
context. It's desirable that the new text be closely linked with the
quoted text it references, which may necessitate chopping paragraphs
in half, and that unnecessary quoted text be excised where possible,
to keep the article's size to a minimum.

When I post I try to consider how the reader will see it. I often add a
line of space between "speakers" to help people differentiate one quote from
another. You seem to run quotes & paragraphs together, which is confusing
even using Quotefix, which at least colors them differently. (The little >s
are hard to count after a while.)

Also, if I chop up a sentence I show that (using ... or something).

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

I've come up with a workable solution: keep posting your "strange
blank attachment thingy" entries, and it there's something worthy of
a reply then someone will do so and thus the rest of us will see
/some/ of what you wrote (just what the respondent CHOOSES to show
us).

That's up to you, but it might be a better idea to get a real
newsreader before one of the more serious bugs in MSOE trips you up.

It's been working perfectly well for me for many years (ever since the
dreaded PacHell DSL experiment); your posts are TRULY the only ones that I
can't read. (Actually, just your posts that you /manipulate/ to be
problematic.)

The only other "issue" I've had was when a few posters didn't use plain
text, so their entries appeared in very small type. Hasn't happened in
months, anyway.

OK, no more replies (to THIS little subthread at least 🙂 ),

Bill S.

Quoted message said:

Pat Lamb said:

If you're upset enough to make multiple posts about an
option, surely you care enough to let your software provider know its
product has a bug, right?

Dear Pat,

Amusingly, a number of people politely asked David to remove a silly bug
that he is deliberately adding to booby-trap his posts.

Given his refusal to fix his own posts, it's hilarious that he is
stamping his little foot at Microsoft and demanding that they remove what
they consider a useful improvement.

Dear Carl,

Huh? The bug is clearly in the newsreader. Content type should be
determined from headers, not message bodies. Every other newsreader I can
think of does this, as called for by the RFCs.

No matter how badly you mangle the message body of *your* posts, I want my
newsreader to display them to me. If you make a typo, unintentional or
otherwise, I still want to see your message.

--
Benjamin Lewis

Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser.
-- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew"

Bill Sornson said:

When I post I try to consider how the reader will see it. I often add a
line of space between "speakers" to help people differentiate one quote
from another. You seem to run quotes & paragraphs together, which is
confusing even using Quotefix, which at least colors them differently.
(The little >s are hard to count after a while.)

Why do you have to count the >s, if your newsreader colours quote levels
differently for you? My newsreader does this, and I can read David's posts
just fine.

Quoted message said:

The only other "issue" I've had was when a few posters didn't use plain
text, so their entries appeared in very small type. Hasn't happened in
months, anyway.

I think you may be referring to the time when some posters had a different
character coding set in the headers. If so, these posts *were* written in
plain text, and your reader had in installation issue regarding character
sets and fonts.

The only other possibility I can think of is messages formatted in HTML,
and I don't think that's what you're talking about.

--
Benjamin Lewis

Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser.
-- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew"

Benjamin Lewis said:

Quoted message said:

Pat Lamb said:

If you're upset enough to make multiple posts about an
option, surely you care enough to let your software provider know its
product has a bug, right?

Dear Pat,

Amusingly, a number of people politely asked David to remove a silly bug
that he is deliberately adding to booby-trap his posts.

Given his refusal to fix his own posts, it's hilarious that he is
stamping his little foot at Microsoft and demanding that they remove what
they consider a useful improvement.

Dear Carl,

Huh? The bug is clearly in the newsreader. Content type should be
determined from headers, not message bodies. Every other newsreader I can
think of does this, as called for by the RFCs.

No matter how badly you mangle the message body of *your* posts, I want my
newsreader to display them to me. If you make a typo, unintentional or
otherwise, I still want to see your message.

Dear Benjamin,

I'm reluctant to call a deliberately coded feature in
someone else's program a bug.

I think of a bug as something that behaves erratically or
fails to do what it promised, not something that I can trip
up with strained trivialities.

I agree with your philosophy about ignoring the body of a
message, but in this case Microsoft's program is doing
exactly what it was coded to do and providing a feature that
they think people may want.

What David is doing is not much different than stamping his
little foot and pouting that the UCI rules specifically
forbid anyone from using a fairing. I might agree that
fairings are the work of Satan and a bad idea for all sorts
of reasons, but scratching them with my key in the parking
lot seems rather childish.

Carl Fogel

Quoted message said:

...
What David is doing is not much different than stamping his
little foot and pouting that the UCI rules specifically
forbid anyone from using a fairing. I might agree that
fairings are the work of Satan and a bad idea for all sorts
of reasons, but scratching them with my key in the parking
lot seems rather childish....

Polycarbonate bicycle fairings (e.g. Mueller Human Power, Zzipper
Designs) tend to get badly scratched in normal use, without deliberate
vandalism. 🙁

--
Tom Sherman - Near Rock Island

!Jones said:

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:56:50 -0700 in
<[email hidden]>
[email hidden] said this:

Quoted message said:

I think of a bug as something that behaves erratically or
fails to do what it promised, not something that I can trip
up with strained trivialities.

A "bug" is an undocumented feature.

Jones... who thinks fairings look "cool". Why else did Superman need
a cape?

Bicycle fairings are for weirdo’s. See
<http://www.ransbikes.com/Gallery/Archive/Sherman.htm>.

--
Tom Sherman - Who used to live in Champaign, Illinois.

David Damerell said:

No. The fact that OE interprets a line starting "begin" followed by 2
spaces as an attachment makes the newsreader crappy.

I had never known this. Well, I guess this is because I've used all
sorts of news readers OTHER than OE. Heck, I've even used PAN (Pimp A**
Newsreader). I'm using Thunderbird now...it's not bad.

Quoted message said:

Not in the least. The situation I'm in is like someone who speaks English,
but is confounded by the fact that some people insist on using
interpreters who faint every time they hear the word "frog".

Indeed. This is hilarious. This is almost as fun as Line Eater bug
(Way before OE's time). OE is just broken, as is IE. Use anything but
those, and you'll remove 95 (a number picked out of thin air, but it's
probably pretty close) percent of your trojan vulnerabilities.

OBTech: I posted earlier about using an internal hub and stay widening
and such, and it occurred to me that it would screw the chainline if I
used the current bottom bracket, so that will have to go too. To top
that off, I read last night from a posting on a blog somewhere (whilst
googling for the availability of Nexus 8 hubs) that someone called up
Shimano and got the reply that Nexus 8's won't be available to end-users
until 2006.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, THERE GOES THAT IDEA.

--
BMO

begin quoting !Jones <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Benjamin Lewis <[email hidden]> said this:

Quoted message said:

Why do you have to count the >s, if your newsreader colours quote levels
differently for you? My newsreader does this, and I can read David's posts
just fine.

Always assume that your reader has a TTY, "dumb" device that displays
128-bit ASCII text in monochrome. You won't go far wrong.

Actually, I do - both use such a device and assume that the reader has
one. You missed "80x25"; I use 80xlots but I don't assume it. But
Benjamin's question was specifically to someone who we know has coloured
quote levels.

I excise all blank lines between quoted text because that reduces the use
of vertical screen real estate, reducing the requirement for readers with
small displays to page. Quoted lines with more than one or two levels of
quotation are rarely necessary in any case.

One previously common misfeature - in, for example, Trumpet - was not to
prepend a quoting character [1] to quoted blank lines, so that the
reader's eye is repeatedly fooled by apparent new text.

[1] Thankfully, the tendency for people to use all kinds of unconventional
quoting characters is largely dead.
--
David Damerell <[email hidden]> Distortion Field!
Today is Second Mania, January.

begin quoting Boyle M. Owl <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

OBTech: I posted earlier about using an internal hub and stay widening
and such, and it occurred to me that it would screw the chainline if I
used the current bottom bracket, so that will have to go too.

If the shift is not too great, long chainring bolts and washers can
correct that; one of the chainrings on my tandem is corrected like that.

Quoted message said:

To top
that off, I read last night from a posting on a blog somewhere (whilst
googling for the availability of Nexus 8 hubs) that someone called up
Shimano and got the reply that Nexus 8's won't be available to end-users
until 2006.

The SRAM 7 is quite jolly.
--
David Damerell <[email hidden]> Distortion Field!
Today is Second Mania, January.

begin quoting Benjamin Lewis <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Given his refusal to fix his own posts, it's hilarious that he is
stamping his little foot at Microsoft and demanding that they remove what
they consider a useful improvement.

I hate to let a trivial fact get in the way of a good ill-informed froth,
but I have never demanded any such thing.

Quoted message said:

Huh? The bug is clearly in the newsreader. Content type should be
determined from headers, not message bodies. Every other newsreader I can
think of does this, as called for by the RFCs.

Carl doesn't believe in the existence of standards. That was established
months ago.
--
David Damerell <[email hidden]> Distortion Field!
Today is Second Mania, January.

begin quoting Benjamin Lewis <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

I personally doubt David's approach will help get the problem solved, but I
still think that complaints about *his* well formed posts are misplaced.

Well, there are two problems. One is that MSOE is no good. The second one
is that people use it. It used to be the case that one would append "to
post" to that, but the massed use of cracked Windows boxes to make other
people's lives miserable means that I don't want people to read news with
MSOE, either.

I didn't start doing this in the hope of fixing either problem. I started
doing this because of a combination of my general annoyance at MSOE users
and their mangled articles, and one specific case where some clown who
used MSOE decided to reply to every article by someone else using this
trick with another article saying "Message Ignored". I don't like spam
very much [1], and I don't like the way that MSOE users tend to portray
their newsreader's problems as someone else's fault - for example, Bill is
still claiming MSOE's inability to deal with certain character sets was a
problem with the posters' articles.

I have no hope at all that the first problem will be fixed in the general
case. I think it's just about possible that this specific case will be
fixed with more intelligent detection of uuencoded portions, but I won't
hold my breath.

I think the second problem might just be correctable on certain groups.
For instance, the original impetus came from rec.games.roguelike.nethack;
[2] that has a very low level of MSOE use anyway, and said clown has found
about the best approach I can think of to get people upset with him. I
know at least one other poster has adopted the "begin " trick, and if
enough people do it, it'll become impossible to read the group with MSOE
at all.

[1] Yes, it's spam; the BI has passed 20 by now.

[2] As Benjamin may know.
--
David Damerell <[email hidden]> Distortion Field!
Today is Second Mania, January.

David Damerell wrote:

{nuttin', honey}

I kinda like his current posts; makes reading the newsgroup go more quickly.

David Damerell said:

begin quoting Benjamin Lewis <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Given his refusal to fix his own posts, it's hilarious that he is
stamping his little foot at Microsoft and demanding that they remove what
they consider a useful improvement.

I hate to let a trivial fact get in the way of a good ill-informed froth,
but I have never demanded any such thing.

Quoted message said:

Huh? The bug is clearly in the newsreader. Content type should be
determined from headers, not message bodies. Every other newsreader I can
think of does this, as called for by the RFCs.

Carl doesn't believe in the existence of standards. That was established
months ago.

Dear David,

By heavens, that merciless logic has convinced me!

As soon as Jobst, Sheldon, and Werehatrack begin putting the
two spaces after "begin" at the opening of their posts to
blow their noses at people whose newsreaders you dislike,
I'll join the movement to support your standard!

nigeb

Carl Fogel

David Damerell said:

begin quoting Benjamin Lewis <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Given his refusal to fix his own posts, it's hilarious that he is
stamping his little foot at Microsoft and demanding that they remove what
they consider a useful improvement.

I hate to let a trivial fact get in the way of a good ill-informed froth,
but I have never demanded any such thing.

Quoted message said:

Huh? The bug is clearly in the newsreader. Content type should be
determined from headers, not message bodies. Every other newsreader I can
think of does this, as called for by the RFCs.

Carl doesn't believe in the existence of standards. That was established
months ago.

Dear David,

By heavens, that merciless logic has convinced me!

As soon as Jobst, Sheldon, and Werehatrack begin putting the
two spaces after "begin" at the opening of their posts to
blow their noses at people whose newsreaders you dislike,
I'll join the movement to support your standard!

nigeb

Carl Fogel

!Jones said:

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:47:44 -0600 in <[email hidden]>
Tom Sherman <[email hidden]> said this:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

A "bug" is an undocumented feature.

Jones... who thinks fairings look "cool". Why else did Superman need
a cape?

Bicycle fairings are for weirdo’s. See
<http://www.ransbikes.com/Gallery/Archive/Sherman.htm>.

Well, you don't see many people flying around with capes, either;
however, I wouldn't want to call Superman a "weirdo". What about
Zorro?

Could Superman fly in "street clothes" and is there any evidence that
he ever did?

Jones

Dear Jones,

Since Superman wears his costume under his clothes, it may
be safely assumed that he can fly at all times.

The real question is where does he put his coat, shirt, tie,
pants, shoes, and fedora after mistaking the phone booth for
the changing room at WalMart?

Are the phone booths of Metropolis littered with dozens of
discarded Clark Kent trousseaus? Does Perry White ever
wonder about Clark's extravagant expense account claims for
clothes damaged during interviews?

Or does Superman wad Clark's duds up, crushing them with his
super strength, and hide them in a secret pocket under his
cape? If so, does he later expand them, wrinkle-free, by
heating them with a judicious blast of x-ray vision?

L. Luthor