Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!husc6!ogccse!cvedc!nosun!fpssun.fps.com!celit!news
From: news@celerity (NetNews Administrator)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: article expiration
Message-ID: <305@celit.UUCP>
Date: 19 May 89 04:12:52 GMT
References: <3877@utastro.UUCP> <431fc60f.15831@gtephx.UUCP> <3897@utastro.UUCP> <6742@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <3195@epimass.EPI.COM>
Reply-To: news@celerity (NetNews Administrator)
Organization: FPS Computing Inc., San Diego CA
Lines: 34

In article <3195@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes:
>In article <3897@utastro.UUCP> james@utastro.UUCP (James McCartney) writes:
>In article <6742@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes:
>>Muts be your site admin expires news without paying any heed to the
>>"Expires" header line.  I post the stuff to news.announce.newusers
>>every 4 to 6 weeks (depending on amount of change and my workload).

>Unfortunately, many news admins do this, mainly because of Expires: abuse.
>Every once in a while, someone complains in the news.* groups about people
>who think their articles should be retained until the 21st century, and
>a chorus of answers come in, talking about expire -I, which, of course,
>throws out the news.announce.users babies with the talk.bizarre bathwater.
>Of course, you can do multiple expire runs...

You can do a monthly cleanup expire which just gets those annoying expires
line abuses.  expire "-I -e 42 -E 42" which will make sure spaf's stuff is
around for six weeks (actually I've been using 31 since I assumed monthly
posting was meant literally).

I recently had discussed "Expires" lines with the person who is keeps
the answers to frequent questions for rec.music.beatles and who uses
a monthly post which tells people to send mail to him to get the info.
He would like his welcome message to come up first when a new subscriber
first reads the group.  Assuming that few sites keep articles w/o Expires
lines for no more than two weeks, this is what will happen 50% or more
of the time.  I searched through the copy of the news rfc that I had
plus through the man pages, installation and admin guides and couldn't
find a thing that would make it happen all the time.  This seems like a
useful thing to be able to do.  If a mechanism exists, then I'd like to
know about it.  If not, it would be nice to add it in the next version
of the news rfc.  It might require an update to the news readers and/or
maybe inews.  I don't know.  What do you all think?

Bill Davidson ...!ucsd!celerity!billd