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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!husc6!harvard!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.news.group,net.news.adm
Subject: Re: If You Love This Usenet
Message-ID: <693@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-May-86 01:46:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.693
Posted: Thu May 29 01:46:54 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 30-May-86 09:03:58 EDT
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 21
Xref: watmath net.news.group:5791 net.news.adm:758


[case where disk space is the ultimate limiting factor...]

From: ebh@cord.UUCP (Ed Horch)
>What I propose for this type of problem is to have inews and arbitron
>interact:  if arbitron knows that nobody reads net.X at this site,
>pass the articles to all downstream sites, the expire them immediately.
>This way, everybody gets all articles, but they don't hang around 
>gathering dust (which is bad for disk drives :-).

How about just compressing the rarely read newsgroups and then teaching
your news readers to recognize these (.Z or maybe there's a magic number)
and zcat'ing or pcat'ing them or whatever you use. You then wouldn't
be limited to unread groups, also groups that just don't seem to be
read too often (I dunno how you would figure that out?) Then if someone
comes along and changes their .newsrc at worst it seems a little slow
in some groups until you realize this and stop packing.

Seemed like a reasonable compromise, no?

	-Barry Shein, Boston University