Expiration Dates On Articles

[Joe Buck]

In article <629 at codas.ATT.UUCP> mikel at codas.ATT.UUCP (Mikel Manitius) writes:
>I was recently approched by the administrator of a neighboring site, and
>asked why the command "find /usr/spool/news -mtime +X -print" (where X
>was some number larger than the number of days given to expire) will find
>articles. The answer was obvious, pre-set expiration dates. However our
>curriosity had us look up such articles. We found articles that won't
>expire UNTIL THE TURN OF THE CENTURY! ...Below is a list of six ...

grep '<id>' ~news/history will find them, so let's see...

>article id		    date posted			expiration date

><316 at phred.UUCP>	     1 May 86 04:38:28 GMT	31 Dec 99 06:00:00 GMT

In this article, Jeffe Parke asks for a vt200 termcap.  I wonder for
how many years he'll continue to get answers.  It's such a
self-defeating thing to do that maybe someone forged the article to
abuse him.

><279 at ubu.warwick.UUCP>	    10 May 86 18:51:09 GMT	 1 Aug 86 00:00:00 GMT

This article announces a faculty position available in the fall.  I
guess this isn't so bad, but people getting free advertising should
be satisfied with two weeks worth.

><4933EV9 at PSUVMA>	    15 Apr 86 05:15:30 GMT	 6 Oct 86 07:00:00 GMT
><302 at phred.UUCP>	    17 Apr 86 09:51:56 GMT	31 Dec 99 08:00:00 GMT
><218 at phred.UUCP>	    17 Mar 86 17:50:41 GMT	31 Dec 99 08:00:00 GMT

I don't have these articles around anymore, because of a disk
problem; I don't do daily or weekly backups of news.

><132 at sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>   7 May 86 12:38:30 GMT	21 Dec 99 02:00:00 GMT

A semi-flame about keyboard design for left-handers.  This guy'll give us
lefties a bad name.

>(Yes, I *do* know about "-I" on expire, that's not the point).

Exactly.  There are good reasons to make an article stay around
longer (like the index to the mod.sources archive, for example).
On the other hand, six questionable Expires: lines in several
months is hardly major abuse ... maybe alerting people who didn't
know about Expires: does more harm than good.
-- 
- Joe Buck 	{ihnp4!pesnta,oliveb,csi}!epimass!jbuck
  Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California