Re: HTML troubles

On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 01:35:33AM -0800, Violet wrote:

> The second thing I'd change is the way the program cannot seem to interpret
> short messages with no subject line (or short subject lines) as posts, but
> flags them as "undecipherable" and sends out the help file.  This is really
> annoying, and it happens all the time.

Yep. The check for administrative-request-lookalike messages in
rc.submit is too aggressive: it catches almost every message that (1)
is short enough (less than six lines and 640 characters) and (2)
doesn't begin with English letter (in addition to things actually
recognized as requests). To make things worse, rc.request tends
to interpret various oddities as subscription requests, so a normal
(short) message may be rejected with "already on the subscriber list",
which is rather confusing.

I haven't quite decided what to do about it, but one solution would
be trashing the test in rc.submit for good and accept administrative
requests only when sent to -request address. For a somewhat
milder solution, look at this pattern in rc.submit:

* -100^0 B ?? ^^([	 ]|$)*\
      ((((archives?:?($|[	 ]+)|\
	  ((send|get)(me)?|gimme|retrieve|mail|ls|dir(ectory)?|\
	    list|show|search|[fe]?grep|find|maxfiles|version|help|info)\
	   ([	 ].*)?$)([	 ]|$)*)+\
	    ([^	 a-z].*$(.*$(.*$(.*$(.*$)?)?)?)?)?^^|\
	(help|info)[	 ]*$|\
	(add|join|leave|sign( [^ ]+ |-)?o(n|ff)|(un|de)?-?sub)\>)|\
       ([^	 a-z].*$(.*$(.*$(.*$(.*$)?)?)?)?)?^^|\
       .*( (join|leave|add .* to|(delete|remove) .* from|\
	 (take|sign|get) .* off|(put|sign) .* on) .* [a-z-]*list|\
	 (un-?|sub?)scri(be|ption))\>|\
       ^^)


Remove the two lines looking for non-ascii beginnings, i.e., to this:

* -100^0 B ?? ^^([	 ]|$)*\
      ((((archives?:?($|[	 ]+)|\
	  ((send|get)(me)?|gimme|retrieve|mail|ls|dir(ectory)?|\
	    list|show|search|[fe]?grep|find|maxfiles|version|help|info)\
	   ([	 ].*)?$)([	 ]|$)*)+\
	(help|info)[	 ]*$|\
	(add|join|leave|sign( [^ ]+ |-)?o(n|ff)|(un|de)?-?sub)\>)|\
       .*( (join|leave|add .* to|(delete|remove) .* from|\
	 (take|sign|get) .* off|(put|sign) .* on) .* [a-z-]*list|\
	 (un-?|sub?)scri(be|ption))\>|\
       ^^)

That seems to take care most of those errors. I haven't tested it very
thoroughly however - caveat emptor.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen