From: wendor@eisley.wa.com (Chuck Gladu)
Newsgroups: comp.bbs.waffle
Subject: Re: "Stripped" newsgroups?
Date: 28 Sep 92 16:19:38 GMT
Organization: Mos Eisley Spaceport BBS

vince@halcyon.com (Vince Skahan) writes:

> dos@major.panix.com (Dave O'Shea) writes:
> 
> >I recently got an e-mail from a rather annoyed sysadmin about 2,500
> >miles from me, claiming that a message I had sent out had been sent to
> >"every system in the world" because the "newsgroups" line contained a
> >trailing comma.
> 
> don't sweat it.  Sounds like the guy needs a valium or something.
> 
> >First, does this sound possible?
> 
> might be possible that waffle doesn't fix a bad newsgroups line, but
> I still wouldn't sweat it if it was a one-time deal.
> 
> hell, you asking the question and me responding probably used more
> bandwidth than the original article the guy complained about :-)
> -- 

Vince,
  Since you have been traditionally one of the steady sources of 
information about waffle in the past I had hoped you would have been more 
helpful in this situation.
  First of all, I was the 'rather annoyed sysadmin'.  And that is 
possible that I sounded annoyed in my letter.  Ever since waffle 1.65 
came out I have been receiving a very large number of messages intended 
for groups I don't get as a result of Newsgroups lines such as:
   Newsgroups: alt.group1,
   Newsgroups: alt.group1,,alt.group2
Both of these will cause most systems to batch the message up for every 
site they feed regardless of whether or not that site receives those two 
groups.  I am told that this is a result of the lines being inerpreted as 
containing the <null> group.  I have very limited space for News on my 
machine and every extra message hurts.
  So far, almost all of these messages have been posted by sites running 
Waffle 1.65.  So I tried a little experiment.
    (Quotes added for clarity)
'post group1'                gives me 'Newsgroups: group1'
'post group1 '               gives me 'Newsgroups: group1,'
'post group1 group2'         gives me 'Newsgroups: group1,group2'
'post group1,group2'         gives me 'Newsgroups: group1,group2'
'post group1, group2'        gives me 'Newsgroups: group1,,group2'

As you can see, the second and fifth examples are the problem.  I believe 
that I saw a message a couple of weeks back listing this as a known bug 
in Waffle 1.65  and I would have hoped that someone would have pointed 
this out to the original poster.  I sent him a message telling him that 
he should contact his sysadmin about this and that his sysadmin could 
then see about a bug-fix.
  This is admittedly a very minor bug in what I feel is an otherwise 
excellent package, but it is resulting in about 30-60 extra messages a 
day that I can't afford to keep around.  So please don't tell me to take 
a Valium.  Instead, help me educate users of Waffle 1.65 as to how to 
avoid this bug until it is fixed.
                             Thank you,
                             Chuck Gladu
                             Sysadmin Mos Eisley Spaceport

-
wendor@eisley.wa.com
...!nwnexus!eisley!wendor
...!seanews!eisley!wendor
                +++ Mos Eisley Spaceport BBS   Seattle, WA +++
Newsgroups: comp.bbs.waffle