These seem to have become quite an issue lately. I think it has come up
because there is a lot of interesting discussion and a large volume of
starship designs at the same time. Traffic has been very high this week
(gee, THANKS metlay :-). Naturally, messages get jumbled up and
disordered on their way to the TML.
What Carl Rigney proposed is this: all the messages that have starship
designs are sorted to the end of the digest. What do you all think of
this? Unless there is outcry or a better idea, I am hoping to implement
this before the middle of next week. Personally, I don't find the
complete designs offensive, as long as they are placed at the end.
I should be able to tell if a message contains designs, by seeing if it
contains most of the strings gauranteed to appear in a USP: "Accom" and
"Commo", etc.
One of the downfalls of this scheme is that the archive message numbers
may not appear in serial order, due to the grouping of ship designs to
the end. Instead, there will be (in serial order) all non-design
messages followed by all design messages.
As for bursting digests, I looked at Ted Kim's digest burster earlier
today. I realized that it is more complex than it needs to be, so I
came up with one of my own. It works great on the new-style digests and
archive bundles.
It is written in C and assumes a Unix-like mail environment, so those of
you using other sorts of systems will still be out of luck. Still, you
would have something to start from, and I would hope you'd share the
results of your work. It will be included in a later message to the TML
today.
James
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Traveller Mailing List Administrator James T Perkins @ Tektronix, Inc
[email removed] Beaverton, Oregon, USA
[email removed] "Load Auto/Evade, Beowulf!"