Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!basser!metro!pta!teti!teslab!charles
From: charles@teslab.lab.OZ (Charles W. Widepy)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Questions re "Expires:" and cross-posting
Summary: Can you restrict the use of expiration dates?
         Cross-posted articles were copied not linked.
Message-ID: <234@teslab.lab.OZ>
Date: 15 Dec 89 05:42:56 GMT
References: <8549@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: charles@teslab.lab.oz.au (Charles W. Widepy)
Organization: Technology Evaluation Section, L.A.B., Sydney
Lines: 13

There was an article <3505@solo10.cs.vu.nl> received here recently
that had an expiry date of the end of 1992.  It was over 32K in
length, cross-posted to 4 groups (comp.editors, comp.unix.questions,
comp.text, comp.misc) but there were multiple copies rather than one
copy with multiple links - meaning it would take up about 400
kilobyte-years on the disk (and we didn't even want it). I have two
questions:

* Why are there multiple copies of a cross-posted article (all other
cross-posted articles I have seen here are linked)?

* Is it possible to prevent the use of the "Expires:" postnews
option?