[news.admin] absurd expires dates

WGRCU@CUNYVM.BITNET (Bill Rubin) (08/06/87)

In article <1987Jul30.174531.19993@utstat.uucp>, geoff@utstat.UUCP says:
>
>Abuse of expiry dates is nothing new.  One site used to (and may still)
>send out all articles with an "Expires: 31-Dec-99" header.  To deal with
>this sort of nonsense, C expire has for quite a while given news
>administrators the option of ignoring Expires: dates, on a per-newsgroup
>basis.
>Geoff Collyer
     
I have been seeing a bunch of articles with expiration dates of 31-dec-1969
of late. These have come from DECWRL, ENEEVAX, UCBVAX, ZEN, and others. Is
there a bug somewhere, or is someone changing expiration dates they don't
like (such as 1999) to this? I doubt it is the latter, since the adminstrator
at DECWRL said he could not find the offending article - it had expired. We
have made a mod to the VM version of Netnews that we run here to use the
default expiration time if the value in Expires: is in the past, so at least
now the articles stay around for me to examine.
     
Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? I can supply article ids if
desired.
     
-------
Bill Rubin         City University of New York
212/903-3676       WGRCU@CUNYVM.BITNET
     
     

dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) (08/09/87)

Here's another abuse of expiration dates.  Perhaps what we need is a
"stop list" of user and/or site names, such that expire will ignore
expiration dates on articles originating from such users/sites.

Meanwhile, I hope sas1@sphinx.UUCP will send out a cancellation message.

   Path: bsu-cs!iuvax!inuxc!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!sas1
   From: sas1@sphinx.uchicago.edu (Stuart Schmukler)
   Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.os.vms
   Subject: Re: WANTED: MicroEmacs binaries for microVMS 4.3 or compatible
   Summary: Vote for posting.
   Keywords: VMS, microEMACS, wanted, VAX, DEC
   Message-ID: <1850@sphinx.uchicago.edu>
   Date: 29 May 87 23:22:35 GMT
   Expires: 31 Aug 87 05:00:00 GMT
   References: <536@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
   Reply-To: sas1@sphinx.UUCP (Stuart Schmukler)
   Organization: U Chicago Computation Center
   Lines: 6
   Xref: bsu-cs comp.emacs:690 comp.os.vms:1012
   
   
   I am is the same situation, so if you need votes for posting I'll vote yes.
   
   SaS
   PS: The problem will be now to post the binary for VMS.  VMS is picky about
   file structure.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  {ihnp4,seismo}!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi