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From: webber@brandx.rutgers.edu (Webber)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: The Mythical Megabyte-Day (Re: Abuse of Expires:)
Message-ID: <316@brandx.rutgers.edu>
Date: Wed, 5-Aug-87 01:39:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: brandx.316
Posted: Wed Aug  5 01:39:23 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Aug-87 03:01:36 EDT
References: <499@wolf.UUCP>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 27
Summary: rule of thumb: let the readers decide what to keep

In article <499@wolf.UUCP>, billw@wolf.UUCP (Bill Wisner) writes:
> And people are yelling at Chuq for a hundred K, every three months?
> 
> A quick check just confirmed that the moderator of comp.binaries.amiga
> and comp.sources.amiga is stamping every article with a four week expiration.
> At the time of this writing, 119K of files are present in those two groups
> that would have been expired by now.

Actually, long expires sound like a great idea.  If I put them on all
of my messages, then I wouldn't have to quote myself in follow ups nor
spend time repeating in private mail the contents of messages posted
months ago :-)

But seriously folks, why should anyone outside a particular machine be
able to influence the expiration policies of a particular machine.
The size of the Usenet flow is 2 megabyte-days.  A 33 kilobyte-months
(assuming that 100k over 3 months means 33k persisting for any given
month) equals 1 megabyte-day in disk storage costs.  Although I quite
enjoy OtherRealms, I wouldn't keep it online longer than any other
messages.  It would be nice to specify that it get backed up on tape
or hardcopy before expiring it though, but that can be said of most of
Usenet.  Doubtless from time to time I will miss an issue, but the
world is large and there is alot to read so it is really no big deal
to miss an issue (I still haven't read the November 1982 issue of
Locus either).

------ BOB (webber@aramis.rutger.edu ; rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!webber)