2.9BSD/usr/contrib/news/wishlist

This is a list of features that probably would be nice but
that nobody has had time to do.  4/25/83

	The user interface still needs work.  Something like notesfiles
	would probably be good.  I can pictures a combined mail/news
	interface with at least 3 windows - a menu (list of messages,
	one line per message, ala Mail); the text of the current message
	being read; and the text of the reply/followup you're composing.
	Window 3 could overlay window 1.  Scrolling in these windows
	seems important.  Discussions should be detected and grouped
	together; it should be possible to shut off a discussion.
	(The newsgroups will be sorted by topic and date in 2.11 - this
	feature has recently been implemented but is far too new and buggy
	to put in the distribution.)

	We need something for experimentation with moderated newsgroups.
	The code now has some hooks to refuse to forward certain newsgroups.
	They will be used for experimentation.  But this is woefully
	incomplete.

	Something to make news more reliable is needed.  Some kind of
	protocol where an article list is sent, and the receiving site
	sends back the list of articles received and checksums; missing
	or mangled articles are retransmitted.  An interactive protocol
	ala SMTP would be a win, if it could be made efficient; a list
	of availale article ID's is sent, the other system replies with
	the names of those it wants.

In the less ambitious category...

	The 2nd break character in the tty driver should be set to space,
	so the user can hit space in response to [ynq] or : and have a
	more consistent user interface.

	Batching is experimental and probably needs more work.

	A facility to map newsgroup names is needed, e.g. a followup to
	fa.telecom is converted to mail to telecom@usc-eclb.arpa.
	Likewise, junk truncated newsgroup names (net.unix-wizar) should
	just be expanded to their full name instead of junked.
	This should fit in with moderation; posting to net.general generates
	mail to the moderator.

	The file structure of 2.10 has been modified from 2.9.  Alas,
	this has broken many of the nice utilities that were written
	for 2.9.  These utilities need to be converted.  Even the
	extra options to expire need to be converted.