nickles (12/14/82)
#R:sri-unix:7800003:ihlpb:7300001: 0:566 ihlpb!nickles Dec 13 16:20:00 1982 An expiration time period on a newsgroup does seem like a good idea. But, that time should be flexible. For example, there probably is very little activity in net.sport.baseball right now since the everyone is refinding football. This is not true for all groups, but sports in particular are dependant on the time of the year. Maybe some groups should just have an "indefinite" timestamp. Or maybe a 1 year expiration date for sports groups. Certainly faddish groups should expire after awhile, such as sctv and pacman. Jack Nickles ihlpb!nickles
trb (12/14/82)
I think an expiration time on newsgroups is a horrible idea. Newsgroup activity is analogous to activity of text pages in a virtual memory system, if they get used alot, you wanna keep 'em, if they don't get used and you need the space, you get rid of 'em. Putting time limits of newsgroups seems analogous to allocating a hunk of memory for a time quantum (yes, quantum) without knowing how useful it will be rather than allocating it when you need it and freeing it when it's no longer needed. So, class, here is a summary: expiration time on groups :: allocating for a time quantum (yecch!) sjb'ing your old groups :: manually managing your resource (better) netnews automatically cans dead groups :: gc'ing zombie resource (best) Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
mclure (03/09/83)
#N:sri-unix:7800003:000:392 sri-unix!mclure Dec 9 03:43:00 1982 ***** sri-unix:net.news / mclure / 3:38 am Dec 9, 1982 The solution is for the notesfile and readnews maintainers (or some random hackers) to add "automatic deletion" of unused newsgroups to their software and see that it gets distributed. Then we would have no need to argue about potential Usenet dictators. A three-month timeout on newsgroup life seems reasonable. Stuart ----------