ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question

[Evan Champion]

On Tue, 14 Jan 1997, Stan Barber wrote:

> No, there is no RFC specification of this. The generally accepted practice
> is that each segment of the name should be no longer than 14 characters
> and each segment should consist of only lowercase alphabetical characters, 
> numbers and the dash character. There can be any number of segments. The first
> segment generally indicates which "hierarchy" the group is associated with.

Hum, I'm noting a lot of them have '_' (underscore) which you don't 
mention.

That, however, doesn't particularly bother me.  What does is the 14 
character limit.  The reason is because I'm starting to see perfectly 
legitimate newsgroups with bastardised names, such as 
clari.news.childrn+family.

The 14 character limit was imposed when that's all you could get out of
the filesystem.  Today, it is not necessary and is a hindrance to
common-sense newsgroup naming, and I suspect it is a big problem for
foreign-language newsgroups which seem to have much larger names (I'm
thinking of the Finnish groups in particular, but they certainly aren't
the only ones.)

I think the specification should unrestrict the length of individual
newsgroup parts, but that the total newsgroup length (which is not
currently specified AFAIK) should be restricted to, say, 127 or 255 
characters.  The longest newsgroup name I have in my active is 72 
characters, so 127 isn't an unreasonable upper limit.  

Lightening the restrictions on groups as I suggested would give needed 
freedom in naming, and setting the maximum group length at 255 or less 
takes care of the 255 character POSIX filename limit, but still keeps the 
alt.* people in check :-)

Evan
--
Evan Champion            * Director, Network Operations
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