Clients for AUTHINFO access/440 error on post

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Katsuhiro Kondou wrote:
> 
> I think we need to consider two cases.  One is newsgroup to
> which can be posted by successful authentication.  Another
> is newsgroup to which can never be posted regardless of
> authentication.  It would not be trivial to implement, at a
> guess, since it's necessary to parse whole semantics of
> readers.conf.

I do *not* think we should be giving detailed hints about which groups are 
possibly listed for some users in readers.conf, any more than we would 
distinguish between "user not known" and "user found, bad password".

If authentication is permitted at all, I think it's reasonable to return 
480.  I would return 440 at most in the case where no authentication is 
permitted whatsoever, and even then it's not really necessary.  (I'm 
thinking about 200 vs 201 for the greeting string as an analogue.)

Of course, 440 would still be appropriate for some non-authentication type 
reason for not being able to POST at the present time.  (I don't know if 
we have any of those.)

-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org