brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (05/07/90)
In article <1990May7.013112.11536@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >In article <1990May6.060754.19912@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: >>Actually, if you want the truth, every group should support "Permanent" >>articles, with special article numbers (negative, prefaced by a letter, >>whatever) that are never expired, but which can be superseded by >>Approved: articles. > >Unfortunately, as with expiry dates, this would inevitably get abuse. >For this and perhaps other reasons, many sysadmins don't *want* random >people on the net to be able to tie up their disk space indefinitely >on a whim. Hence the provisions in C News expire for setting absolute >bounds on just how long an Expires line can postpone expiry. I disagree. Since a permanent article would need to be entered with the "Approved" header, I think abuse would be low. To be honest, in 10 years of USENET, I don't think I've ever seen noticeable abuse of the Approved: header. Unless you count alt.hackers. With good reason. It would piss off a lot of people, and might even fit the legal definition of forgery or impersonation. If permanent articles were to be instituted (and to do so would require changes in the news database program, expire program *and* the readers, so it's no easy thing) I think it would be respected. Such articles would be rare. Such articles without a "supersedes" on them would be very rare, and easily tracked. Not a disk space problem. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473