indexing service (was Re: Stupid reposting service)

[Kyle Jones]

Edward Vielmetti writes:
 > The problem with the existing alt.sources.index is that there 
 > really isn't a lot of information in there -- no article titles,
 > no people names, no sense of what might be useful or not.
 >
 > If you don't already have those articles on your spool partition,
 > I'd have a hard time arguing that you should get them all just
 > in case they were interesting.
 >
 > Not that it's a bad idea, don't get me wrong -- just that it could
 > add a little more value than just the Message-IDs and better 
 > accomplish its stated goal.
 > 
 > --Ed

alt.sources.index does what it is intended to do: identify sources.
"Interesting" and "sources" are synonymous in the context of
alt.sources.index.  This also seems to be the basic assumption under
which the reposting service is operating; anything goes as long as
it's source, correct?  If so, then alt.sources.index is obviously the
more economical of the two schemes.  I'm not averse to others posting
indices in alt.sources.index, provided the proper article format is
used.

As for human readable indices, does anyone else think the format of
alt.sources.index should be changed to have some human readable data
along with the message-IDs?  Now is the time to make such changes,
while there is yet little or no software that will be broken by the
change.

What I have in mind is a second field surrounded by double quotes that
gives a terse description of what the article is.