Note : the special nature of OUI (very oriented to offline use)
made it quite unusual to myself for conducting the evaluation. I may have missed
some features of the software or made some incorrect assumtions. Anyway, I think
that the main parts of this evaluation are correct(this is certainly true for
critical points).
The software as reviewed fails the Good Net-Keeping
Seal of Approval for Usenet Software for the following reasons :
- The reader does not display all essential headers. See
note 1,
- The validity of email adresses (From and Reply-To fields) is not
checked.
Though not required by GNKSA/U, some points could be improved :
- The software should keep all References from original article when
posting a followup (actually it keeps only two References),
- When prompting the user if he wants to ignore followup-to, the default
answer should be "No",
- The default quoting method should be the "Internet quoting style"
(prepending by ">") instead of the strange "Dvorak
style",
- The bug which inserts spaces in the attribution line (which occurs
sometimes into the Message-ID of the quoted article) should be corrected (see
note 8),
- The software should respect "Post WYSIWYG" and not rewrap lines
without warning the user,
- The software should prevent obvious errors such as posting an empty article
or an article containing only quoted text.
Due to the small lacks of this software, I personnally think that fixing it
for GNKSA/U compliance will be easy to Dvorak and I wish they will do so. I
would however not recommend it to people not familiar with
Usenet. It is also (in my opinion) not adapted to online use but on the other
hand, this is probably one of the most efficient (in terms of money!) offline
mail/news readers available for the Windows environment.
This software may be found at http://www.dvorak.com.
Below is the detailed evaluation checklist :
Req Itm Sub- Item
rd? ## Description item OK? OK? Notes
Y 1 Display all essential header info NO
Y default is to display NO 1)
Y a) display author YES
Y b) display subject YES
Y c) display newsgroups list YES 1)
Y d) display Followup-To list YES
Y e) display Reply-To if /= From: YES
Y 2 Provide standard commands YES
Y clear YES
Y separate YES
Y a) post a new article YES
Y b) post a followup article YES
Y c) reply by email YES
N use standard terminology YES
Y 3 Implement cross-posting YES
Y allow user specification YES 2)
Y cross-post (not multi-post) YES
Y 4 Change essential headers YES
Y change headers while editing body YES 3)
Y change Subject YES
Y allow at least 70 chars in subject YES
Y change Newsgroups YES 2)
Y change Followup-To YES 2)
Y allow followup-to: poster YES
Y change Reply-To YES 2)
Y 5 Correct Subject headers in flwup/rply YES
Y a) prepend "Re: " (exactly!) YES
Y b) preserve entire Subject YES
Y even subjects > 80 chars long YES
Y 6 Respect Followup-To YES
Y use to initialize Newsgroups: in flwup YES 4)
Y recognize and act on 'poster' YES 4)
Y 7 Followups contain References YES
Y contains message-id of original YES
Y never truncate individual message-id YES
N contains three Refs from original NO 5)
N contains entire Refs of original NO
Y 8 Direct email reply to Reply-To YES
Y 9 Quotation and attribution YES
Y provide method YES
Y set off by prepend YES 6)
Y attribution line YES 7)
Y identifies author YES
N gives message-id YES 8)
Y 10 Subject is mandatory YES 9)
Y do not post empty or provide <none> YES
Y allow change while editing body YES
Y 11 Must provide valid From: header NO
Y syntactically valid NO 10)
N belongs to the user NO 11)
Y 12 Must provide cancel YES
Y of own articles YES
Y *not* of others YES
N 13 Respect line length, and post WYSIWYG NO
N line brks shown are present when posted NO 12)
N do *not* post paragraph w/o line brks YES
N warn if body has lines > 80 chars NO 12)
N external editor conforms N/A
N 14 Prevent obvious errors NO
N prevent posting empty article NO
N prevent posting only quoted text NO
Notes to the checklist
First a short description of what the columns in this checklist stand
for:
- Req?:
- A "Y" means that the item or subitem is a MUST for the software
in order to get the Good Net-Keeping Seal Approval.
- ITM ##:
- This is the item number in the GNKS document : <http://www.cybercom.net/ ~rnewman/Good_Netkeeping_Seal>
- Description:
- Follow the above link to the original document for a more detailed
description and an explanation of the rationale behind it.
- Subitem OK ?: and Item OK?:
- If the item is required, this is marked "YES" if all _required_
subitems are ok. If it is _not_ required, it is marked "YES"
if if _all_ subitems are ok.
- Notes:
- These are given below:
- Only From:, Subject and Newsgroups (which is
named "To:" : IMHO very confusing) fields are displayed. The user may
display all headers through a special function (Alt-2 or a button in the reading
window) but I found no way of always displaying these headers.
- I first thought this to be impossible. This is however
possible through the Modify optional field in the message header
(Alt-2)
function or button. Not very easy to find for newbies. It would be more simple
to leave users the possibility of simply edit the Newsgroups: field. Moreover,
this would allow to modify this field easily while editing.
- One has to press a special button for this. No very
easy, but IMHO this satisfies GNKSA/U requirements.
- Followup-to is respected and the software even informs
the user about what is happening. However, the user is prompted by the software
if he wants to ignore the Followup-To field. The default answer is
"Yes"
: I strongly disagree with this : this should be "No" as Followup-To
should be respected until the user has very good reasons to ignore it.
- Only two References are kept..:-(
- The quoting style is by default "Dvorak style"
where all quoted lines are prepended by ">>" and followed by
"<<".
This is quite strange. As an "Internet quoting style" may be
configured, I do not consider this as a software flaw.
- The attribution line is inserted only when quoting
with "Internet style",
- There is a bug in the software : some blanks are
inserted inside the Message-ID when inserted into the attribution line. This
seems to be related to wordwrapping,
- The subject is absolutely mandatory
(nice feature!),
- From and Reply-To are never syntactically checked,
- This may be considered impossible on a single user
(no real system administrator) platform.
- Posting is sometimes NOT WYSIWYG. When one composes
articles with more than 70 characters in lines, no wrapping occurs in the
composition window (with default settings, the composition window is around
60-70 characters wide but may be expanded when posting a followup). The article
is wrapped when sent without warning the user. This leads two problems :
- The user has no idea of what happened,
- The article may be messed up
The wrapping idea is basically a
good idea, but it is inappropriately implemented : the
composition window should be 60-70 characters wide by default and leave the
users the possibility of typing and sending articles with wider lines just by
resizing it, if they want to do so. The software should only warn the user about
Netiquette when he(she) posts such an article.
This evaluation has been conducted by Christian
Perrier