From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 17:10:11 CDT
On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 04:11:25PM -0500, Kent Landfield wrote:
>
> "news spool directory" != "archive"
>
You keep saying it but I don't see any real difference in the examples
you give. A news server serves up news articles. An archive server,
you seem to say, serves up files, including news articles. I don't
see a big difference, and by your definition, deja was not an archive.
The notion of a "spool" is archaic (dating back to tapes) to mean a
temporary area, but it's never been inherent how temporary it is or
that it be temporary at all. (Indeed over time, our mail spool has come
to hold a permanent mailbox)
The thing that makes archives of interest or concern to people is that
they keep articles long after they are "current" (with current being
a vague term, though with most people agreeing that articles under one
month of age are current and those over 6 months are not current) but
more importantly that it offers them up, either free or for sale,
to the general public
Some people are worried about that, they don't want these archives to
become a publicly accessible history of their life online. They would
like to have a more ephemeral USENET which gets a different nature
because it is ephemeral.
And sometimes we all share that desire, though most of us realize that
if you post it in public, you may be silly to expect this to happen.
Any archiving rules you might set would at best reduce the number of
archives, never eliminate them.
Alas, if you tried to make a "guaranteed ephemeral" newsgroup I suspect
it would just make even more cause for people to archive it in secret.