From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 20:15:07 CDT
Dennis SCP (dennis.scp@multiweb.nl):
>I wrote the answer already:
>There is no date based maximum expected retention by the users.
That is nonsense. First you say: "Users expect articles to be kept as long
as newsserver storage capability can provide." That's about a week here.
Now you say there is NO expected maximum. But there is, it's called the
Expires header, and it is date based.
>Because of the limitation of that local newsserver it gets archived only
>for a week.
That statement makes no sense at all. The local newsserver is not archived
anywhere that I know of. And archiving for a week is a pretty useless
archive.
>The article has to be archived to be spread, that is how Usenet works.
No, that is not how USENET works. An article has to be copied to be
spread, but it does not have to be archived. That's just silly.
>You archive everything on a server for a single group of users.
That's malarky.
>The only reason for
>deleting older articles is when the server gets full.
Or when the author tells you to. But the issue is archives not servers.
>You can't say no to archiving when you post to usenet.
Of course you can. It is done every day. I thought we were well past
having to deal with this kind of nonsense.
>Users should be able to ask for a maximum
>duration of archiving by stating a date, to make things easy we can
>define a standard date.
And they should be able to say NO and it doesn't happen at all. It is
pathetic if we cannot support the users in getting USENET to do something
they so clearly want done. This is something that takes a trivial amount
of programming to accomplish and does't interfere with normal transport at
all. It doesn't change the basic properties of USENET.
Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com):
>You keep saying it but I don't see any real difference in the examples
>you give.
When the archive I ran was open to the public, it was not a "news spool".
(It still isn't a news spool.) It was an archive. There's an example with
a difference.
>Any archiving rules you might set would at best reduce the number of
>archives, never eliminate them.
Where did you get the ridiculous notion anyone was trying to eliminate
archives?
>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.
Who is talking about "ephemeral newgroups" other than you? You believe
that my using the Archive: no header makes a newsgroup "guaranteed
ephemeral?" What nonsense.
It's simple. Any language that doesn't make honoring the header a
requirement is worthless. Why will anyone bother? Oh, yeah, I forgot.
"Social pressure". Right.