USENET line eater?

[Guy Harris]

> < this is the first line of this article >
> < this is the second line of this article >
>  
> Okay, everybody on USENET seems to be convinced that there
> exists a bug somewhere which causes the first lines of
> articles to disappear.  I myself have never noticed any
> mutilated articles on the net.  Does anyone know whether
> the dreaded line-eater really exists?

There wasn't a bug that caused the first lines of articles to
disappear.  There *was* a bug that caused the first bufferful (512 or
1024 bytes) of articles whose first line of text was indented (with a blank
or a tab) to disappear.  The bug wouldn't eat either of the lines
listed above; it would have eaten the first line of

	This is the first line of this article
This is the second line of this article

and the second line, and quite a bit of text after that.  The bug's fix
is fairly well known, and

1) People have been putting in lines at the front of articles, usually
not indented; whether their rationale was correct or not, it had the
desired effect.  Our machine sticks a blank line at the front of all
such articles.  (Some people have stuck in *indented* "bug-catcher" lines
at the beginning of articles with an otherwise *non-indented* first line,
which has the exact opposite effect.)

2) More sites have fixed the bug, especially sites that pass a lot of
articles through them; I remember somebody saying the bug didn't affect
articles posted locally, only articles passed through the site.

So you probably aren't seeing as many munched articles as before.
Unfortunately, the version of B news that's distributed with 4.2BSD has
the bug, so any new 4.2BSD news site is likely to re-introduce the bug.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy