> The approval process should check for this, IMHO. Even some versions of
> auto-faq seem to generate somewhat bogus dates. The effect is that these
> articles are expired as usual, which mostly is shorter than their intended
> lifetime.
We don't require articles to have valid "Expires:" lines because that
would mean a posting maintainer would either have to use one of the
specialized FAQ posting software packages or server, or would have to
generate an "Expires:" by hand. The latter is unreasonable, as
generating dates by hand is both tedious and error-prone.
As for the former, unless we requires each and every poster to
*.answers to use faq-server@rtfm.mit.edu or post_faq, software which
we control, we cannot ensure that articles have valid
machine-generated "Expires:" header lines. Such a requirement is also
unreasonable in my opinion, because the software packages aren't
available on every platform, and faq-server isn't as flexible as
posting by hand or using some of those software packages. (In
particular, I've never heard of something as configureable as
auto-faq, for example, on MS-DOS machines or Macintoshes.)
That said, when we do happen to notice "Expires:" lines in submissions
that are invalid, we do mention this fact to the submitter, and
explain that the date cannot be arbitrarily formatted. The most
popular mistake is to use a relative date, which it would be nice if
more news software understood, but reality says that a lot of software
don't understand it. Plus, there's no de facto widespread standard
for a relative date format.
> (I've even found articles in news.answers that had neither Expires nor
> Supersededs lines, which by the default setup of dexpire means they are
> _never_ expired, but that's another problem yet...)
Almost exactly the same statements I made above for the "Expires:"
line applies to "Superseded:" lines.
If dexpire's default setup is that articles without "Expires:" lines,
or which are never "Superseded:" by another article, are never
expired, then that's an extremely broken aspect of dexpire's defaults.
I don't think it's something which it is reasonable to ask other
members of the Usenet community to have to make allowances for.
I believe the vast majority of Usenet articles don't have "Expires:"
lines; if you can't deal with them, it really won't matter whether
you can properly deal with the ones which are cross-posted to the
*.answers newsgroups.
(That sounds a little bit harsher in tone than I wanted, but I
can't think of a good rephrasing.)
Ping Huang, member of the *.answers moderation team
<news-answers-request@mit.edu>
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