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From: ane@hal.UUCP (Aydin "Bif" Edguer)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Expiration dates on OtherRealms
Message-ID: <164@hal.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Jul-87 10:55:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: hal.164
Posted: Thu Jul 30 10:55:08 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 15:25:49 EDT
References: <2525@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: ane@hal.UUCP (Aydin "Bif" Edguer)
Organization: Biometry Computing Facility
Lines: 55
Keywords: Chuq Gilmore Otherrealms expire terrorists

Intelligent Peoples Court, July 30, 1987.
I sure can't preside here but I will make a statement.

John, Chuq, I am sorry, you both are right.  A consequence of an imperfect
universe.

In USENET news 2.11 there exists the option to change the default expire
date for an article.  Though normally fourteen days, it can be changed to 
almost anything.  For reasons I leave as an exercise to the reader, this
option should be used sparingly.

For these reasons, I agree with you John that before ever using the option
of extending the expiration period, alot of thought should go into the
real need to do so.

Current examples of places where this option is in use is
	news.announce.conferences (moderated)
	news.announce.newusers    (moderated)
	news.config               (15990@gatech.gatech.edu)
	news.stargate             (43389@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV)
What all these have in common is that they have been posted by responsible
people and have been given reasonable expiration dates.

What makes the expiration dates reasonable?
In my opinion it is reasonable to leave conference announcements up until
the conference.  It is reasonable to leave the Call-for-Papers up until the
deadline for submission.  It is reasonable to leave the information, we
expect all new news users to read, up until a new version can be posted.
These are examples of important information that have an explicit real world
expiration.

I agree with Chuq that it is reasonable to leave Otherrealms up until a
new issue comes out.

What is the difference between Otherrealms and say comp.sources.unix?
Comp.sources.unix is certainly run by a responsible person and contains
valuable information.  The difference is in the SIZE (by almost two orders
of magnitude) and the fact there is NO reasonable expiration date.
The source will always be valuable and thus has no explicit time when it
should be expired and therefore MUST fall back to the default.

We can argue whether the default is too long or too short but we currently
leave that up to the individual site.  And besides...that is a different
topic of discussion.

Just for reference:

	Newsgroup		Current Size	Oldest	Furthest Away
news.announce.conferences	 90554 bytes	Apr 19	Jun 20 1988
rec.mag.otherrealms		112180 bytes	Jul 10	Nov  7 1987

Aydin Edguer
USENET  : !{cbosgd,decvax,sun}!cwruecmp!hal!ane
INTERNET: edguer@cwru.EDU
Biometry Computer Lab, Case Western Reserve University