warren@ihnss.UUCP (Warren Montgomery) (04/24/84)
The worst aspect that I have seen of the flooding of the network with old netnews is that one or two very old articles will look new to people and revive a long dead debate. The best solution is, of course, to build more safeguards into the distribution mechanism in order to prevent single failures from causing a flood of old news. I would like to raise a couple of suggestions in order to try to prevent it: 1) Build in a check into rnews to refuse to accept news with a submission date older than 2-3 weeks. This would be severe, but would certainly catch a lot of errors. 2) Build in a warning into readnews and vnews for any attempt to follow up on very old articles. Users should be allowed to issue such followups IF THEY REALLY WANT TO, but it would probably cut down on the number of followups to dea subjects to have some warning for a posting that would do so. I have watched netnews grow from a dozen sites and a dozen newsgroups to it's current global size. I am amazed that this has been accomplished so smoothly, and hope we can look forward to further smooth growth. As the news load grows and the network becomes more widespread, preventing the proliferation of useless articles (this is not a commentary on the contents of the news, I mean really useless stuff, like duplicates) will be an increasingly critical problem. -- Warren Montgomery ihnss!warren IH x2494