lauren (12/06/82)
Greetings. Automatic newsgroup expiration/removal would seem like the only sensible solution. Unlike what we have over on ARPA, I don't consider it practical to "centrally administer" this net, and I'm not convinced that it would be desirable in any case. It is very important that local site administrators be able to maintain final control over netnews activities on their sites, otherwise we will find users being cut off from the network by administrators unwilling to have such an important resource under "remote control" from practically anywhere else on the net. A final comment: if some users wish to receive some of the ARPA digests in undigested (hmmm, where's the Pepto-Bismol?) form, that is all well and good, but the option of continuing to receive the digests in their original form must be maintained. There are many people who VERY MUCH prefer digests to hundreds of small messages. Some of the digests are carefully designed to be on similar topics and are very skillfully arranged. I for one would be very upset if the morning paper arrived as a big envelope full of separate little stories through which I'd have to wade. There have been rumblings from digest maintainers in the past about the concept of "forced" undigestifying of major ARPA digests, we (wearing my ARPA hat at the moment) do not much care for people being FORCED to read digests in a form other than that in which we sent them out. How people read such materials *by their own choice* is none of our business, of course. Thanks much. --Lauren--