111636 - Wish: a menu option to choose news server

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, enhancement)

Description

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120
BuildID:    20011120

I use my notebook both at home and at work whose ISP's are different.  And I
subscribe to the same newsgroups in both ISP news servers.  When I'm at home, I
can't send any post because I subscribed to the news server of ISP at work after
that at home, and apparently the latter has got priority.  In order to make it
possible to send again, I have to unsubscribe those "repeated" newsgroups (it is
not necessary to remove the news account).

So, it would be nice if there's a menu option which can let us choose the news
server to use.  I don't think there're many cases like me, so it doesn't matter
even if the menu option is very deep or not easily found at all.  It just needs
to exist and I'll be satisfied already.

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Confirming, see also bug 54911.

Comment 2

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

My bug isn't a dup of 54911.  Stephen Donner, could you undup it, please?

Comment 3

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Oh, I thought this bug was marked as a dup of 54911, sorry.  By the way, could
the severity be marked as "normal" or "major", but not "enhancement", because
this bug is really annoying.

Comment 4

[Felix Miata]

Behavior should be like Netscape 4. The server serving up the group you are
reading from should be the one automatically used for a reply or new message. No
menu selector should be necessary.

Comment 5

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

The problem is: suppose you have typed a post, but got something important to do
and have to quit Mozilla.  Next time when you get back, you open Mozilla and
continue to type the post without getting connected or without reading any post
from any group beforehand.  In this situation, how would you define "The server
serving up the group you are reading from"?  Or does this imply that user have
to read anything before he could send the post?

Comment 6

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 7

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Same old story: File a bug without detailed Steps to reproduce (STR), without clear-cut, separate and detailed Actual Results and Expected Results, and rest assured that nobody will ever look into your issue because almost everybody will fail to understand it in the first place (or even if there's something understandable, it's too hard to parse).

Teak (reporter), can you provide the missing information in a structured manner?
Do you still see this problem on recent version of Thunderbird (TB17 or Trunk)?

STR:
1. start here, with these settings
2. do this
3. do that

Actual result:
- this is what happened
- and this

Expected result:
- this is what should have happened
- and this

Comment 9

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

I don't mind to recheck if the problem still exists in recent version of TB and complete the information if needed -- I'll come back few days later.  But before blaming others for not doing correctly their jobs of reporters, maybe it would have been wiser for you to check the context:
My bug was filed in 2001. At that time, bugzilla didn't show users those formalized steps as it is today, ie, we had a blank text area for the description. I estimate my description was very detailed.

Comment 10

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to 石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong) from comment #9)

Thanks Seak, Teng-Fong for your reply (btw, what is your first name?)

> I don't mind to recheck if the problem still exists in recent version of TB
> and complete the information if needed -- I'll come back few days later.

That's helpful. :)

> But before blaming others for not doing correctly their jobs of reporters,
> maybe it would have been wiser for you to check the context:
> My bug was filed in 2001. At that time, bugzilla didn't show users those
> formalized steps as it is today, ie, we had a blank text area for the
> description.

Oh, I see. In that case, pls accept my apologies for sounding a bit harsh in my comment. I must have been a bit frustrated as we have plenty of bugs which just fill the database because they are not actionable, often with poor description, and they are causing a lot of work and problems in bug management.

> I estimate my description was very detailed.

Perhaps yes, but as you can see, nobody ever commented on this bug since comment 6 from 2002. From my bug triaging experience, unstructured and/or incomplete description can often cause that.
Personally, I'm not much into news, but I would have tried to reproduce from structured steps. Without such, it is too hard for me, but maybe others with more experience in news can do.
Looking forward to your details, pls do come forward so that we can see what needs to be done.

Comment 11

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Please close this bug as it is no longer matching the reality as of 2013:

1. News servers were provided by ISP more than ten years ago and accesses were limited to IP address, username, password, telephone numbers, etc so that users from other ISP cannot access them.
   Nowadays, we have many many public news servers and we can subscribe from no matter which ISP.

2. Internet access was slow (provided by 56k modem) and limited in time or "paid as you use" at that time. So it was in users' interest to connect to the nearest news server to reduce connection time, thus paying less monthly fees.
   But now most Internet access is unlimited in time, and at high speed.

3. My company's ISP does not provide its own news server. As a matter of fact, fewer and fewer ISP provide their own news servers.  So I'm unable reproduce the problem here.

Comment 12

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to 石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong) from comment #11)
> Please close this bug as it is no longer matching the reality as of 2013

Thank you very much Seak, Teng Fong, for reporting back which is very helpful. :)

Closing wfm per reporter's comment 11.

Comment 13

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

It's rather a WONTFIX or INCOMPLETE instead of a WORKSFORME, as it has never worked for me :)