Re: lynx-dev Preventing news header modification

[David Woolley]

> 
> I am using a modified verstion of Lynx 2.7. Are there any patches or has a
> more recent version been released which fixes the news header problem? I
> don't want people to be able to modify any of the headers. I can remove
> the prompts but the headers are written out to the file and then it may be
> edited by the user.

Although, in general, I agree with the view that Lynx should not try to
be a fully fledged news client, I would consider any news posting agent
that doesn't permit modification of:

- Newsgroups;
- Followup-To;
- Summary;
- Subject.

on followups to be broken

According to the RFCs, Summary is only intended for followups.

In many, particularly popular computing, newsgroups, there is a tendency
to shot gun posting, in which the article is cross-posted to large number of
newsgroups, in most of which it is off topic, because the original poster
couldn't be bothered to work out the correct group and ignored the the
no sibling and no parent cross-posting guidelines.

Threads often wander, and even this mailing list gets a few articles
entitled "Lynx Problem", so subject changing is necessary to reflect
the current topic of a branch, or to insert a useful subject where the
original poster was lazy.

If you don't feel you can permit such changes I think you either need to
solve your user education problem, or to prevent news posting entirely.

If volumes are small, you might want to consider locking them into a
local CNews server on which inews (run by nntpd) is fudged to mail
everything to you for inspection, instead of sending it.