Description
''' What is the problem you are trying to solve?'''
Archive,org provides a series of mbox archive files which contain the postings to various newsgroups (USENET/NNTP). (See Issue #35 for a more general request in respect of USENET support)
However, there are a few usability issues with these archives.
- Currently as provided some of these postings do not contain dates in a form which is parsed fully by Mboxviewer.
(This on examination may be due to these postings only containing a partial date as opposed to a full ISO date/time format as specified in the relevant RFC.)
This is in some instances results in replies to postings appearing in listings 'before' the nominal posting they are replying.
- In a few instances, the postings do not contain a complete References: field, due to various factors, including interactions with Google Groups which has used varying internal threading-referencing approaches, which are not necessarily the same as those in a relevant RFC for USENET more widely.
'''What would you like the application to do?'''
Provide a mechanism or process whereby a user can select a 'posting', and then by a series of semi-interactive prompts, 're-order' or 're-thread' postings semi-interactively, in order to reconstruct a nominal corrected thread/posting order, based on header information (such as Message-ID's , Google Thread ID's, partial dates and other information in the postings concerned.
The application, would then cautiously modify/update information in the mbox file and it's internal index, potentially reconstructing a new References (and other relevant fields) for postings as required. There is no need to provide the ability to reconstruct or add complete dates from 'partial' dates, although if implemented this should be a seperate header field from the original Date field (such as RevisedDate , or DateAnnotation, which the application could use in the future to reconstruct a nominal order.)