chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (06/22/85)
I've just gone through and cleaned out my system again, and it brought to
the forefront another bad habit/trend I'm starting to see on the network,
the random and inappropriate use of the Expires: header line. I just
removed a message in net.sport.hoops that was a status report on the NBA
finals. So far, so good. It had, unfortunately, an Expires line in it to
July 1, which meant that it was going to stick around significantly longer
than the rest of the news.
If this were an isolated case, I wouldn't worry about it. Unfortunately,
I've had to clean out about 10 of these in various groups over the last
month or so -- things that stuck around long after the rest of the articles
I got at the same time have gone to netnews heaven. I can handle it by
changing expire, of course, but that also would affect things like
net.announce.newusers that ought to stick around, and that have good
Expires: dates.
This seems to be another case of netnews protocol breakdown. As a system
administrator, I set a specific age limit to articles on my site. Unless
you have a very good reason to override that limit, you shouldn't. If
enough people decide to ignore this, it will cause me to use up more disk
space than I have allocated for news around here, and the older articles I
don't want could cause me to get rid of newer articles I do want. Before I
let that happen, I'll just start ignoring the Expires: line, but that
causes the opposite problem. I don't keep articles I do want because I have
to get rid of things I don't want. Unless, of course, I decide to hand
prune, which takes up my most critical resource -- time.
If you ignore the protocol, it becomes a no win situation. Expires: lines
should NOT be used unless there is a very good reason. If you aren't sure
the reason is good enough that EVERY person on the network will agree with
you, don't use it. Simple? I thought so... Then why aren't people doing it?
your mother.
--
:From the misfiring synapses of: Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA
The offices were very nice, and the clients were only raping the land, and
then, of course, there was the money...control@almsa-1 (William Martin) (06/24/85)
I believe that this "overuse of 'Expires:' problem" can be traced to the inclusion of the "Expires:" header field in the posting-template that shows up inside "rn". "Postnews" doesn't prompt for "Expires:", nor many of the other header elements, and therefore only those who know enough to add them correctly can ever use those header fields. Their inclusion in the "rn" template encourages their use. Maybe the next version of "rn" can prune all this excess stuff out of the template, so it will not be used to excess, and also so those of us who are familiar with it don't have to waste time deleting all those fields with every posting. Will Martin
tim@cithep.UucP (Tim Smith ) (07/04/85)
It sounds like what is needed are two forms of expire; say +date to mean
that the article should stay around at least until the specified date, and
-date to mean it should be gone before that date.
--
Tim Smith
ihnp4!{wlbr!callan,cithep}!tim