jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (05/16/89)
In article <3897@utastro.UUCP> james@utastro.UUCP (James McCartney) writes: >> Still no one has answered my second question : How do I read the articles in >>news.announce.newusers ? When I do 'readnews news.announce.newusers' I get >>'No news.' I also tried using -x with the same result. In article <6742@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes: >Muts be your site admin expires news without paying any heed to the >"Expires" header line. I post the stuff to news.announce.newusers >every 4 to 6 weeks (depending on amount of change and my workload). Unfortunately, many news admins do this, mainly because of Expires: abuse. Every once in a while, someone complains in the news.* groups about people who think their articles should be retained until the 21st century, and a chorus of answers come in, talking about expire -I, which, of course, throws out the news.announce.users babies with the talk.bizarre bathwater. Of course, you can do multiple expire runs... -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
chip@ateng.ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) (05/17/89)
According to jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck): >Every once in a while, someone complains in the news.* groups about people >who think their articles should be retained until the 21st century, and >a chorus of answers come in, talking about expire -I, which, of course, >throws out the news.announce.users babies with the talk.bizarre bathwater. And yet again, talk.bizarre is blamed for things not of its doing... -- Chip Salzenberg <chip@ateng.com> or <uunet!ateng!chip> A T Engineering Me? Speak for my company? Surely you jest! "It's no good. They're tapping the lines."
wcs) (05/19/89)
In article <6742@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes: > Must be your site admin expires news without paying any heed to the > "Expires" header line. I post the stuff to news.announce.newusers > every 4 to 6 weeks (depending on amount of change and my workload). Back when I was running a news machine, we had enough spool for about 5 days of news - expire isn't real effective when you don't have much news around, and runs too slowly for more than once/day. So we'd let expire do its thing, but every hour we'd check if the disk was too full, and simply trash the oldest articles. If that still didn't work, it was find -mtime +4 -print | xargs rm . Maybe C News would have helped, and it wouldn't have been too tough to egrep -v newusers, but basically if you need space you need it now. -- # Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs # also found at 201-271-4712 tarpon.att.com!wcs # More Colombians die from American tobacco than Americans from Colombian coke.
news@celerity (NetNews Administrator) (05/19/89)
In article <3195@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: >In article <3897@utastro.UUCP> james@utastro.UUCP (James McCartney) writes: >In article <6742@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes: >>Muts be your site admin expires news without paying any heed to the >>"Expires" header line. I post the stuff to news.announce.newusers >>every 4 to 6 weeks (depending on amount of change and my workload). >Unfortunately, many news admins do this, mainly because of Expires: abuse. >Every once in a while, someone complains in the news.* groups about people >who think their articles should be retained until the 21st century, and >a chorus of answers come in, talking about expire -I, which, of course, >throws out the news.announce.users babies with the talk.bizarre bathwater. >Of course, you can do multiple expire runs... You can do a monthly cleanup expire which just gets those annoying expires line abuses. expire "-I -e 42 -E 42" which will make sure spaf's stuff is around for six weeks (actually I've been using 31 since I assumed monthly posting was meant literally). I recently had discussed "Expires" lines with the person who is keeps the answers to frequent questions for rec.music.beatles and who uses a monthly post which tells people to send mail to him to get the info. He would like his welcome message to come up first when a new subscriber first reads the group. Assuming that few sites keep articles w/o Expires lines for no more than two weeks, this is what will happen 50% or more of the time. I searched through the copy of the news rfc that I had plus through the man pages, installation and admin guides and couldn't find a thing that would make it happen all the time. This seems like a useful thing to be able to do. If a mechanism exists, then I'd like to know about it. If not, it would be nice to add it in the next version of the news rfc. It might require an update to the news readers and/or maybe inews. I don't know. What do you all think? Bill Davidson ...!ucsd!celerity!billd
jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) (06/15/89)
In article <305@celit.UUCP> news@celerity (NetNews Administrator) writes: >In article <3195@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: >>Unfortunately, many news admins do this, mainly because of "Expires": abuse. >>Every once in a while, someone complains in the news.* groups about people >>who think their articles should be retained until the 21st century, and >>a chorus of answers come in, talking about expire -I, which, of course, >>throws out the news.announce.users babies with the talk.bizarre bathwater. >>Of course, you can do multiple expire runs... The news software already has configurable limits so that incomming articles greater than a certain age will get rejected. I suggest that it should also have a configurable limit on the maximimum time allowed in an "Expires" line. Many postings make good use of the "Expires" line but they seem to limit themselves to a month or perhaps 6 weeks. The problem is the jokers that specify 31 Dec 1999. Assuming we can agree on a reasonable limit I propose that the expire software be modified to enforce that limit by allowing a maximum of N days between posting and expiration. I propose a default limit of 90 days. Of course each site could taylor that based on its needs. I do not suggest rejecting postings with long expires or changing the "Expires" line in the article. Each site should have the option of how much to trust the "Expires" lines.