Believe it or not, but the order of the ids on a group line is
important because of yet another bug in some servers. If a short
id is a prefix of a long id (which might be an email address) and
the long id appears first, then that will be used, erroneously.
So we sorted the ids by length, which puts the shorter userids
before the email addreses, typically.
This is not important if your server does not have this bug.
I don't know which ones do now, but NCSAs httpd did, and Apache
and others inherited some of its code.
In the new version of HN, the group files are not used at all.
They were just too much trouble, and getting worse as the number
of members grows. Now HN does the checking for whether an
authenticated user is in the group. This also clears the way for
more interesting group structures such as groups within groups, and
groups per forum.
dan
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userids and email addresses are sorted by length 
.hngroupmembers
(Jim Gallagher)
