From: Kent Landfield (kent@landfield.com)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 17:34:51 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.
On the contrary.. Deja was an archive first and a newserver second. Deja
was an archive with web delivery software customized for displaying
and searching and injecting news articles. Deja/goggle is a special
case. There are not many of that type of service around. One of the
reasons they added support for X-No-Archive was because they considered
themself an archive serving news articles instead of a news server and
wanted to do the right thing.
# 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)
It is temporary for 90% of the sites out there. There is too much news
to take a full feed and keep it around permanently today. We have been
hearing for years that we will soon be able to keep years of it on line.
Every time we think it's close the traffic expands to fill up the available
space. Reguardless, the model for and software of the news systems deal
with a spooldir.
The other thing that news spool directories aren't (for the most part) is
public. It's become harder to find a reliable open server due to the threat
of spammers. Archives on the other hand are very often public and read-only.
# 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.
That's never been the case. Archiving of articles has occurred from the
very beginning. Henry did a good job, Bruce Jones picked it up. NetNews/CD
type services, archive.org,... We need to deal with the reality of Usenet
when it comes to archiving. (A date parameter in the Archive header is a
start, but one with no guarantees.)
# 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.
Agreed.
# 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.
Yep.
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Search the Usenet FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ Search the RFC/FYI/STD/BCP Archive at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/