dave (12/09/82)
It would be nice if postnews automatically saved your news for sending out in, say, 15 minutes. I don't think such batching would hurt, and with a parallel "rmnews" program it would let people unpost something they'd rather not have posted. For example, I think a lot of people follow-up news requests to the net before reading through to make sure no-one's done it before. Also, on rereading news you may decide you shouldn't have sent it after all. The only way of retrieving it at the moment it by rooting around in /usr/spool/news and hoping the uucp link doesn't get to the file before you do. I'll probably decide in 2 minutes I shouldn't have sent this, Dave Sherman
essick (12/11/82)
#R:utcsrgv:-76600:uiucdcs:10900012:000:1193 uiucdcs!essick Dec 11 14:54:00 1982 This is one of the reasons that I decided to make the notesfile transmission mechanisms batched. Rather than figure out protocols and other things for deleting notes across a network, I decided that once it was out, you were stuck with it. The batching makes it easy for someone to say ``Gee, I didn't really want to send that'' and either edit the text or outright delete it. We used to spool all of our new notes/responses out to our local neighbors (who run notes) and to pur-ee (via news) hourly. Our system load is now high enough that it has been changed to every 3 hours during prime time and every 2 hours during the evening. Clearly how frequently to spool things is a function of the system load and what sort of connections you have. With our current setup, I get an average of an hour to retract anything I say. You can probably guess that I favor batching updates. It helps in a number of ways: (1) people get a chance to retract silly comments and mistakes, (2) fewer things running around in the uucp directory, (3) you get better UUCP utilization (a single big file will go better than a lot of small ones). -- Ray Essick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign