Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!lavaca.uh.edu!uhnix1!splut!jay
From: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay Maynard)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: news.announce.newusers (was Re: Reader polls)
Message-ID: <3032@splut.conmicro.com>
Date: 11 Nov 89 11:16:52 GMT
References: <8911091544.AA21726@thep.lu.se> <1989Nov9.191236.23264@agate.berkeley.edu> <351@crabcake> <110@toaster.SFSU.EDU> <353@crabcake>
Reply-To: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard)
Organization: Confederate Microsystems, League City, TX
Lines: 31

In article <110@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes:
>>How is a new user supposed to even learn of the EXISTENCE of those
>>news.announce.newusers articles in the first place?  (given that many sites
>>expire them at a rate more frequent than they arrive)
>Each article in n.a.n carries an explicit 3-month expiration to
>exempt it from the normal system expiration, and a Supersedes:
>header to expire-on-demand the previous edition.  Any news
>administrator who overrides this (and this takes special effort),
>is, IMHO, not merely incompetent, but malicious.  ...

Right. All it takes is a line in crontab:
0 2 * * * /usr/lib/news/expire -e2 -i
Real special effort, that. (Yes, I expire news here after 2 days.) Any
news administrator who doesn't do this leaves himself open to the moron
who discovers the Expires: header and posts his jokes to rec.humor with
an expiration date in 2004.

Until I get news 3.0 running here, or figure out a way to expire
news.announce.newusers under different rules than all other groups
without running expire twice, it'll stay that way, too. (For those who
arenew to this, expire is an expensive program to run, both in terms of
time and CPU.) As I write this, expire has been running over 2 hours and
9:43 of CPU, and isn't halfway through. I'm not about to run something
like that twice a day unless I really need to for some reason like being
tight on disk space.

-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL   | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jay@splut.conmicro.com       (eieio)| adequately be explained by stupidity.
{attctc,bellcore}!texbell!splut!jay +----------------------------------------
Shall we try for comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac next, Richard? - Brandon Allbery