nobody said:
I'm not interested in what's a "real" newsreader, all I want is
something simple that reads text posts. Thunderbird line-wrapped that
post just fine.
Yep, and so will many other newsreaders - but NOT all of them. One long
line can result in a user having to keep scrolling to the right to read
the rest of the line, or the long 1-line paragraph may get truncated at
the window or console width. Depends on what newsreader is being used.
Don't expect everyone to be using your newsreader or that they all
display the same as yours. Not all of them will automatically wrap when
the line is longer than the window width and not all of them will move
the wrap point back to the start of the prior word. Even web-based
readers (i.e., Usenet leech sites using a forum-to-Usenet gateway) may
not correctly wrap the long line.
I see you, while using Tbird, managed to figure out how to configure it
to physically wrap lines so they remain under ~70 characters in length.
I suspect the OP is using a Usenet leech site operating a forum-to-NNTP
gateway that takes the web form data (1 long line per multi-sentence
paragraph) and is dumping it into Usenet without any de facto formatting
to maintain a maximum physical line length. That means it isn't a
problem with misconfiguration with the OP's newsreader but rather a
crappy leech site, so the problem needs to be brought to the attention
of the site's operator. I'm not a member there and, for most forums,
the admins or moderators aren't going to heed complaints from
non-members. In fact, most of these forums operating a Usenet gateway
are just slapping on an extension to their forum software for which they
haven't a clue how to configure that extension or it may have no
configurability. The forum-to-Usenet gateways that I've seen are
simplistic and designed with the forum in mind and their coders are not
regular Usenet participants to understand or care about how those posts
get ported to Usenet.
Yes, you 40tude_Dialog is a very powerful, multi-talented mewsclient
that can do about everything but change the color of your underwear,
but I doubt that it's even necessary to read this low-traffic froup.
And yet it is NOT for users of "powerful" newsreaders where you should
be polite in physically wrapping lines at 76 characters, or less.
Yes, you're new to Usenet and your experience is limited in not
understanding that not everyone uses a newsreader that can properly wrap
physically long lines. Also, the RFCs for Usenet dictate that lines
shall not exceed 998 characters in length. With a long paragraph
composed of several sentences but all put into one very long line, it is
quit possible that this limit gets exceeded. That means not only do you
have problems with less-powerful readers but the storage or transmission
of the post could get truncated upstream.
As for spam..
Not every newsgroup has the same "spam standards".
Off-topic = spam. In the vast majority of cases, signatures are always
off-topic (some ego-stroking fluff, repeat of the poster's moniker,
spamming their personal site, or some cutsy [random] useless quote of
the day) - but they ARE signatures! Like Teranews and other NSPs, many
append their promotional "signature" to a user's post. Yet they do NOT
properly use a sigdash delimiter line to mark the start of a signature.
That means the off-topic (spam) content is in the *body* of the post.
Grabit is a newsreader that constantly spams every post submitted with
it. Many [free] NSPs also add their spam to every post submitted
through them. A user of either who knowingly posts with this non-
signature crap appended to their posts is themself an affiliate spammer.
I don't mind these various "autoblog" type posts that are damned near
ALWAYS on-topic (or at least I think so).
It wasn't the link to the poster's blog that was the spam (that's just
ego-stroking drivel that I wouldn't bother reading). It was the
non-signature promotional crap for their NSP appended onto their post
(either as their choice or because of the forced by the NSP that they
chose to use).
