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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: usenet volume problems...
Message-ID: <6803@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 15-Jun-86 03:12:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6803
Posted: Sun Jun 15 03:12:52 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Jun-86 03:12:52 EDT
References: <74@rtgvax.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 60
Keywords: ...one solution

> ...the actual *volume* of quotes in follow-ups
> constitute a pretty major factor in the traffic problem.
> ... The solution immediately
> coming to mind is to have the posting software replace all quoted
> regions with a [reference to the original article]

This is, in general, a fairly good idea.  Unfortunately, it doesn't work
very well.  The problem is that articles do not necessarily reach all
sites in the same order or at the same time.  It is quite possible for
the "original" article to reach a site some while after the followup.
This is the origin of the stupid "Orphaned Response" swill from notes,
which attempts to pretend that there is a uniform ordering of articles
across the network.  Alternatively, it is possible for the followup to
arrive quite a while after the original, so the original has already
expired.

> The only problem here is obviously that the quotes cannot extend beyond
> the date news is expired. The solution here can be to expire selective
> newsgroups over longer periods (i.e. technical ones) and the ones
> currently proposed in the talk groups with shorter periods...

Many sites are already selective about expiry dates, but for other reasons.
Small sites often simply cannot afford to keep even the technical groups
around for two weeks or so; they don't have the disk space.  Other sites
consider the disk-space/benefit ratio of the noisy groups too low to keep
them around.  Note that the noisy groups would be the ones that would
really benefit from the quote-compression scheme, so it's got to work for
them to make it worthwhile.

> Since the life of an article and its relevance would generally depend on
> the expiration cycle of the newsgroup... the necessity for temporary groups
> such as net.politics.terror would be eliminated since discussions should
> generally run-down shortly after most of the quoted articles expire.

This is a conjecture, not an obvious fact.  Also, the purpose of the
temporary groups is not to shorten discussions, but to move particularly
noisy discussions out of ordinary groups.  It's all very well to say that
expiry times would limit the life of the discussion, but that doesn't
address the problem of newsgroup pollution *during* the discussion.

> For important matters, a mechanism could be implemented to allow users
> (or the system manager on their behalf) to request a copy of
> an expired article from a central archive to access a quote beyond the 
> expiration date of that article...

Who's going to maintain that archive?  Please understand that this is *not*
a trivial undertaking.  The accumulated archives of Usenet since we joined
it (quite early) total something like 1.2 gigabytes, and the rate of
accumulation is rising steadily.  Nobody is going to keep that mass online,
and nobody is going to want to mount tapes for the sake of such requests.
Just keeping the last couple of months would suffice, but even that means
something like 100 megabytes of news.  If you are volunteering to be the
archive site, fine, but please don't assume that other volunteers will
leap forward.  We are very well supplied with people proposing nifty ideas
for *somebody* *else* to implement.  We "somebody elses" are getting very
tired of this.
-- 
Usenet(n): AT&T scheme to earn
revenue from otherwise-unused	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
late-night phone capacity.	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry