Re: Re: Politics on this echo?
  By: A. Dumas to mark lewis on Mon Mar 29 2021 07:17:51


 >>> And you guys (and/or your admin) should fix that damn clock! All date/time
headers from fido are wrong.

 >> please direct your complaints to the proper place as depicted in every
message
 >> gated from fidonet into the group... the necessary data should be easily
found
 >> in the headers...

 > It's easily found all right but it is on you.

no, it is not...

 > You are bothering us with that faulty gateway, *you* are using that
software.

no, we are not using that software... we have no control over what someone else
runs on their BBS system... that someone has chosen to run a gateway package
and connect an echo with a newsgroup is their decision and their's
alone... since you are the one(s) being bothered, it is on you to complain to
the gate operator... most things look just fine over here...

 > I don't know Paul Hayton, I don't have an account on his system.

email doesn't work?? interesting...

 > No conversion is needed, just a correct format of the Date: header. I
 > suspect it is being converted wrongly; it should just use the current local
 > time of the gateway computer with the correct timezone added.

are you saying that my message, written from the US east coast (UTC -0400 right
now) should have its timestamp thrown out and the time my message is processed
at the gateway should be used?

or are you saying that the gateway software should convert my UTC -0400 time
stamp to UTC +1300?? that should be easily handled in the cases where the
message has a proper TZUTC control line...

however, TZUTC is a relatively new ""feature"" in fidonet messages... it being
only a decade or so old... it is not required by the fidonet standards and
there's a lot of older software being used that has no idea what TZUTC
is so their posts carry only the timestamp with no indicator of the
originator's timezone... if the original software and standards had specified
that the message time stamps were to be in UTC this would not be a problem but
fidonet is a hobby network with a ton of software written by hobbists... we
won't even talk about the time stamps of the messages written by users and
uploaded to the BBSes using offline messaging standards like QWK, QWKE, and
Bluewave which also know nothing about timezones...

 > It says +13 which seems right,

since the gateway is located in New Zealand, that sounds about right...

 > so just use that without any time conversion.

see above...

 > Right now, all fido posts appear to be from the past, sometimes older than
 > the post they are replying to.

we see similar on this side of the fence, at times, too... we don't worry about
it since we're more interested in the message bodys (first), maybe who wrote
the message (second), and possibly some third thing related to the
message or conversation or people involved...


)\/(ark
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