steffen (05/27/82)
After seeing many "forgot to sign my previous article" news articles, this common mistake has prompted me to suggest that the various news submitting commands (postnews for B netnews) automatically append the file $HOME/.signature to an article. The mail system I use does this and it is VERY handy. If you wanted to get fancy, you could have a .net.signature file, a .btl.signature file, etc., to handle address variations. Joe Steffen
egb (05/28/82)
Would also like to suggest that netnews EXPIRE newsgroups as well as articles. I would vote for a one month inactivity and whammo, away goes the group. Seems like if a whole group of people have nothing to say in one month, the maintenance of the group on 1000 machines is not economical. Can this feature be put into 2.XXX of netnews?
egb (05/28/82)
News groups and news articles should have the same control protocol. Hence, anything you can do to an article, you can do to a group. (I.e. make it permanent, give it a different expiration date). One other possibility is when the articles go to zero, the group dissappears (suggestion of rabbit!ark). Only problem is that people can have different expiration criteria on different machines. Hence, on one machine a group would expire while on another it wouldn't. Anyway, newsgroups should definitely expire!