Re: why graphical screenshot? from a command prompt console window?

On Thu, 2/19/2026 5:31 AM, J. P. Gilliver wrote:
> On 2026/2/18 18:38:54, Frank Slootweg wrote:
>> Paul <[email protected]> wrote:
> []
> 
>>>       <[email protected]>
>>>
>>>      mid:[email protected]
>>>
>>> And maybe one of those strings will work. We'll see.
>>
> With my Thunderbird (140.7.1esr (64-bit)), hovering over either of those
> (they do show in blue) shows them with "mailto:" prepended in the status
> line, and actually clicking on them opens an email window; presumably it
> noticed the @ sign and reacted accordingly, but ...
>>
>>   The format should be <news:<MID>>, i.e.
>>
>>        <news:[email protected]>
> 
> That one shows in the status line as news:///fl... (yes, three
> slashes!); clicking it had no effect.
>>
>>   The 'news;' part is required, otherwise it's ambiguous, because it
>> also looks like an e-mail address.
>>
>>   It's defined in the schemes for URI, in whatever the correct RFC might
>> be these days. I.e. like 'http://' for a web URL, 'mailto:' for an
>> e-mail address, etc..
>>
>>   Some newsreaders try to do the right thing when the scheme  part is
>> absent, but <news:<MID>> is the only correct way. We'll see if
>> Thunderbird et al understand it.
> 
> Not the (almost-)current one.
>>
>>   AND, there of course is still the issue that the newsreader must be
>> able to actually fetch ('article'/'head'/'body'commands) the article/
>> headers/body. I.e. like an 'http://' URL might fail, so might a 'news:'
>> one, for all kinds of reasons.
> 
> I'm not signed up with 4ax.com (I take it that's a news server); maybe
> it would have if I was. (But it didn't give me any error or anything.)
> 
> Actually, I've just noticed that it not only converts news:fl into
> news:...fl in my status line, but adds something like "downloading
> messages to drafts" after the @4ax.com; I have to say "something like",
> because it has changed while I was typing this: what I _now_ see in the
> status line when I hover of it is "news:[email protected] No messages to
> download". It does - including the <> - turn from blue to red briefly
> while I'm actually clicking on it (i. e. while the mouse button is pressed).
> 

Did you test with a Nightly, as a check for forward-progress ?
I'm not familiar at all with running these, but this is the
quickest way to tell whether the MID mod got any traction.
You would be doing this for science <snicker>. A thing like this
should start with a private profile. The profile might even be
inside the launch folder, rather than being in AppData. When
I tested with the Betterbird Portable, that should be largely
similar to the operation of the Nightly. I would be testing
this in a VM, because I hate cleaning up a mess, and I just
shovel these VMs into the trash :-) The one I was using for
the Betterbird test, is already gone. When you do a build yourself
of Thunderbird, these days, with an HG (Mercurial pull), one of the
outputs would be one of these.

   https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/2026/02/2026-02-19-10-01-27-comm-central-l10n/
   https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/2026/02/2026-02-19-10-01-27-comm-central/

The method I observed being used in Betterbird is "technical"
but not "optimal", and it depends on how snooty the TB devs are
as to whether the idea would have any traction at all. The launch from
command line, as a URI, that's the slow one, the while-running selection
of Mork Summary Files to scan, seems to be faster.

There might be a small amount of similarity, if someone were implementing
a crosspost-read feature. You could clumsily do it by keeping a lot
of group.msf files open, with a resulting larger-average RAM footprint.
The current devs will always be thinking in terms of scalability,
which many people here (with one exception) would not be testing
and commenting on. My subscription list is too short to notice
how slug-slow it would be with a thousand groups subscribed (but
not actively read). There's even a danger for people on smaller
machines, they might run out of RAM if they subscribed to a thousand
groups and a MID-launch was attempted.

There seemed to be some difference, in how Netscape Communicator treated
multiple USENET servers, and perhaps how Thunderbird treated them. This
led to the <cough> bug we used to see, where it would triumphantly claim
"you cannot send to two servers at once", and how it used to cherry
pick group a.b.c from AIOE and d.e.f from E-S. There is something you
can type, into the newsgroup area to stop that (basically directing
the stupid thing to stop auto-selecting servers, then denying such
a function exists), but that was an issue for quite a while.

The USENET news component was re-written in javascript, and that was
the opportunity to change the internal architecture away from the
fractured thing it used to use.

   Paul