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From: WGRCU@CUNYVM.BITNET (Bill Rubin)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc
Subject: Re: absurd expires dates (was: expiry date abuse)
Message-ID: <627WGRCU@CUNYVM>
Date: Wed, 5-Aug-87 23:08:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: CUNYVM.627WGRCU
Posted: Wed Aug  5 23:08:26 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Aug-87 14:23:46 EDT
References: <2525@hoptoad.uucp> <2821@phri.UUCP> <1371@epimass.EPI.COM> <4040@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Organization: The City University of New York - New York, NY
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Xref: mnetor news.admin:805 news.misc:835
DISCLAIMER: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article


In article <1987Jul30.174531.19993@utstat.uucp>, geoff@utstat.UUCP says:
>
>Abuse of expiry dates is nothing new.  One site used to (and may still)
>send out all articles with an "Expires: 31-Dec-99" header.  To deal with
>this sort of nonsense, C expire has for quite a while given news
>administrators the option of ignoring Expires: dates, on a per-newsgroup
>basis.
>Geoff Collyer
     
I have been seeing a bunch of articles with expiration dates of 31-dec-1969
of late. These have come from DECWRL, ENEEVAX, UCBVAX, ZEN, and others. Is
there a bug somewhere, or is someone changing expiration dates they don't
like (such as 1999) to this? I doubt it is the latter, since the adminstrator
at DECWRL said he could not find the offending article - it had expired. We
have made a mod to the VM version of Netnews that we run here to use the
default expiration time if the value in Expires: is in the past, so at least
now the articles stay around for me to examine.
     
Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? I can supply article ids if
desired.
     
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Bill Rubin         City University of New York
212/903-3676       WGRCU@CUNYVM.BITNET