Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval explained
The Good NetKeeping Seal of Approval or GNKSA is a designation that indicates a piece of Usenet newsreader (client) software meets a set of usability and formatting standards. The name is a play on the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval", a set of consumer reports issued by Good Housekeeping Magazine.
The original GNKSA author thought that many newbies to Usenet posted malformed or inappropriately-sent articles because their software did not encourage better netiquette. For instance, software which made it easy to confuse replying to a sender by email with posting a followup to a newsgroup led to users mistakenly publishing what was intended to be a private response, or vice versa.
Some of the guidelines from GNKSA 2.0 are:
- The user can see the essential header fields, including "Newsgroups" and "Followup-To".
- The user can edit all header fields when composing a followup.
- There is a clear difference between 'followup' and 'reply'.
- Followups preserve the Subject and References of the original article, unless the user explicitly changes them.
- News software respects "Followup-To" and "Reply-To" specifications.
- What the user writes is what gets posted, as is.
Additional requirements concern accurate From: headers, signature block formatting, and the ability to cancel and supersede articles.
Further reading
- Web site: Ron Newman . The "Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval" for Usenet Software . 1.2 . 1995-01-09 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20090507215248/http://www2.thecia.net/users/rnewman/Good_Netkeeping_Seal . 2009-05-07 . - version 1.2 of the GNKSA
- Web site: Jeroen Scheerder. The Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval. 2.0. 2001. 2009-09-20. 2002-11-05. http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20021105002051/http://www.gnksa.org/. dead. - version 2.0 of the GNKSA
- Web site: Jonathan. de Boyne Pollard. [//jdebp.eu./Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html The Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval for MUAs]. 2002. Proposals. - a proposal for a similar Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval for Mail User Agents
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