brilliance

[John Woods]

In article <21982 at uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU>, gary at oak.circa.ufl.edu writes:
> In article <5192 at solo8.cs.vu.nl>, maart at cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes...
> |Cancelling a posted message means posting a cancel message. 
> Uh, what exactly does posting a cancel message involve?
> A message with the subject CANCEL #xxxxx? Or the same message with the topic
> CANCEL? Or what.
> 
A cancel message is essentially an ordinary message distinguished by
having a header line such as

	Control: cancel <nincompoop at frog.UUCP>

Such messages will be found in the "control" group, even if the Newsgroups:
line reads differently (I was hoping to put such a control line in this
message, but tried it out first and discovered that it doesn't do exactly what
I wanted...).  Other than that, the message has exactly the same format as
a regular news article.  Any text in the body will be ignored, but that tends
to be the fate for many regular messages, too :-).

When a system receives such a control message:  if the referenced article is
present, it is removed, and the cancel message is propagated downstream to
other sites.  If the article is not present, B news sites simply leave a note
in the "history" file to junk the article if seen; C news (I believe) also
forwards the cancel message in any case.

-- 
John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (508) 626-1101
...!decvax!frog!john, john at frog.UUCP, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw at eddie.mit.edu