1. Expire a cross-posted article on the basis of the *shortest*
expiration time of any newsgroup it is posted to, not the longest.
2. Additionally discriminate, via early expiration, against any article
cross-posted to more than a threshold number of newsgroups (four was
the threshold mentioned).
The stated reason for making these changes is to reduce spool area
consumption by (improperly) crossposted binaries and widely-crossposted
flamefests. However, the changes will pretty much destroy the ability
of FAQs to persist in the local spool between postings: not only will
a long expire time for news.answers not help (not that they ever had
one at netcom) but rule #2 will target any FAQ with more than one
home newsgroup. I have not seen the implementation, but I imagine that
application of rule #2 would override any Expires: header in the article.
I haven't had much success persuading the newsadmins that articles
cross-posted to news.answers ought to be exempted from these policies.
What bothers me most about the situation is that the admins seem to think
that *most* sites are implementing policies like this, or soon will.
Apparently these ideas are fairly generally accepted in the news.admin
newsgroups (which I have not kept up on for a long time).
So, if you think that well-run sites are likely to be keeping FAQs around
for the stated expiration interval, think again. One-day expiration may
soon be the norm.
Is there anything that FAQ authors as a group can or should do about this?
Or should we just accept it as life in the nineties, and revise our own
working habits to fit within such policies? Maybe the crosspost policies
for news.answers need to be rethought.
regards, tom lane
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved