167991 - news URLs are not deterministic - iterate through default ISP News account and all non-ISP-dependent Newsfeeds

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, defect)

Description

[Ralf Hauser]

Build 2002091014

As said (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153300), I am a roaming
user therefore, I am forced to have multiple newsfeeds.

When trying open the there mentioned news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html,
my Mozilla looks for this newsgroup with two problems:
1) That newsgroup is not available on the first news account it tries, but I
will not let me try other newsgroup accounts (that are not ISP dependent as
described in http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167989). Thus I have to
subscribe to the newsgroup by hand.
2) It happened my previous default was msnews.microsoft.com which carries only
its own groups. Even when opening the Mail-And-News Window, Setting a default in
"Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings" according to my currently used ISP,
clicking on the above news link again - it still looks for msnews instead of
news.sunrise.ch.

Comment 1

[benc]

Well, your news URL conforms to RFC 1738, which, despite their claims that it
not a URN, is very similar. The underlying concept is that news groups would in
a similar manner everywhere, so the actual server you access would not matter. 

I like to say that Usenet news is the "newspaper" of the internet, and they
thought it all should be the same. This analogy is more accurate than it sounds,
because assuming world-wide uniformity of content in either case is flawed.
(When I get the WSJ outside of Cali, I don't get the "California Report").

news: URLs were also envisoned before we had muti-ISP users, or locally
distributed news groups, or multi-server news clients.

The best possible interpretation of a news: URL would be to list servers to
which you have subscribed to, and offer to open the correct group. If you cannot
find the group, it should offer to let you select a news server.

That being said, this is actually a mailnews and not a networking problem.

Comment 2

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

to default.

Comment 3

[Yves Lambert]

well it was hard for me to find out this bug. it really messes up, i thought it
was resolved... 
why a link news:group in usenet does not allow to subscribe to the group in
usenet when several news server are set? i'd like to find a way to turn around
this problem. anyway, in usenet, all URI of groups are like this: news:group for
the simple reason that there are several servers for usenet.
adding myself to cc

Comment 4

[Jonadab the Unsightly One (Nathan Eady)]

I would think the correct behavior would be to pull the group from the first
configured server that has the group in question, querying each in turn 
until either one has it or the list of news servers is exhausted.  If the
user specifically wants to get the group from a certain server, they should
have to expressly do that (i.e., subscribe it by hand), because the usual
case is that the user doesn't care where it comes from; they just want to
read the group.

That said, this is an issue of user-interface polish, making something 
easier that is already possible; there is no serious loss of functionality
here, because the user can select the group by hand, though that's a pain.

For extra bonus points, if no configured news server has it, open up a
Navigator window to http://groups.google.com/groups?group=%s

Comment 5

[Yves Lambert]

> For extra bonus points, if no configured news server has it, open up a
Navigator window to http://groups.google.com/groups?group=%s
yes it should be great :D 
but simply when a relative link is in a message in a group, the expected
behaviour should be to subscribe to the group in the server not *any* other
server. on netscape news, for example, it should be more reliable to write go to
news:thisgroup and reask your question instead of
news://news.netscape.com/thisgroup this is a nonsense for people who use
news:mozilla.org and for usenet as there is 2 or 3 servers/ISP it's impossible
and pointless to put an absolute link.

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.