Subj : Re: In the future..
To   : Deon George
From : Nick Andre
Date : Mon Jun 01 2020 08:38 am

On 01 Jun 20  12:26:19, Deon George said the following to August Abolins:

DG> Well, what happens when something else is in that field? I suspect nothing,
DG> because it can either be numerical (a phone number), an IP address (I've se
DG> some implementations like this - prefixed with 000- IIRC), or text
DG> "-Unpublished-" as is used in some cases.

The phone number field is a "critical" field.

Nodelist compilers don't just read that field for the phone number, they often
build a cost table around it. When something other than Unpublished is in that
field, the assumption by at least three different compilers is that it must be
numerical, and then prefix-checking is done against it. This is why you cannot
have domain names in the phone number field as an example.

The use of 000- was a horrible ugly idea; a stopgap measure. From my
understanding it was determined that a net-wide survey was done and many
Sysops discovered that Unpublished could be used without the Pvt flag.  That
effectively resolved the issue of using 000- IP addresses in the phone
number field. That eventually vanished in favour of the INA/IBN flags.

Nick

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 * Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (1:229/426)

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