=================================================================
EDITORIAL =================================================================
Taking P4 seriously?
A recap from five years ago. Problem still not solved.
Yes I know that I'm violating one of the rules that I myself have been
adament about during my entire tenure here, but since this issue has
come up so many times now, I felt it important to make it official by
posting it in our official channel, and not only in the FIDONEWS echo.
Ponder this quote from Fidonews Vol. 9 No. 52 (28 December 1992)
for some time:
/*********************************************************************
* IMPORTANT NOTE: The FidoNet address for FidoNews has been changed. *
* The new address is: *
* *
* FidoNews = 1:1/23 *
* *
* Starting January 1993 email sent to the old address will not be *
* forwarded! You were warned! * *********************************************************************/
It took just two and a half years to start ignoring P4, that says
that the Fidonews should be at 1:1/1.
When I became Fidonews Editor in 2002, it became even more obvious
why hard coding the Fidonews address into P4 was a mistake. By then it
was unthinkable that anyone but someone from zone 1 could ever be the
editor. And yes, for a few months there was one, a handful of years
before me, but he never really acted as one.
The z:z/1-6 node numbers were previously reserved for Zone Gates.
If you look at today's Zone 4 entry, you can see how it used to be 20
years ago.
Already in 2002 the idea about Zone Gates was rather obsolete, but
even so, there never was any need for a Zone Gate to the zone itself,
i.e. z:z/z. The 2:2/2 node number was removed already in November 9
1988 after less than a year and almost a year before P4 was written,
so reserving the z:z/z node should never had been any problem.
With the help from Ward we tried to make the first change to P4 for
more than a decade, suggesting that the Fidonews should have the ZIN
node number z:z/z rather than the hard coded 1:1/1.
Unfortunately a bunch of RCs came out of the woodwork and hijacked
our policy change attempt, adding all kinds of more or less futile
changes. Needless to say, it all crashed miserably. Our attempt to
take it one small step at a time, just to demonstrate that it could be
done, failed. Leaving us with the present dinosaur in effect still
today.
Thanks to the foresight of ZC2, Ward Dossche, in 2002 I got the
node number 2:2/2 just the same. The nodenumber that Fidonews holds
still today, almost two decades later, in clear violation of P4...
About the history of 1:1/1, here's some interesting reading. Notice
the futile attempts to hijack Fidonews using the nodelist between 2011
and 2015.
http://tinyurl.com/y3c64efr
Special thanks to Pavel Gulchouck (2:463/68) from Kiev, Ukraine,
who gave us the above amazing service and who has served Fidonet
well for more than 25 years.
Go there and find out a lot about yourself and those around you.
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--- Azure/NewsPrep 3.0
* Origin: Home of the Fidonews (2:2/2.0)