Aharpo.266 NET.news utzoo!duke!chico!harpo!jerry Mon Jun 15 20:31:16 1981 Welcome back mark This item is in reply to mark's objection to my protocol for avoiding long transmissions of news that a machine has already received. I had wondered why mark hadn't comment on the original discussion. I see now that he never saw it. To respond once more: Yes it may take several polls to get news. But my proposal is to have an optional mechanism (controlled in .sys). Sites that get their news by infrequent polling of other sites would not have to use it. On the other hand such sites might find it the modified protocol better because at relatively little cost (in phone bills) they could increase the frequency of polling and could poll more machines. The problem of disjointed conversations is very real. Frequently we receive the reply to an item before we receive the item. I would like to suggest that people put a line or two at the beginning of their submissions (like the head of this one) to indicate what they are replying to. Jerry ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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.