Expiration Dates On Articles

[Mikel Manitius]

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! And they come from such passive
newsgroups as net.jokes and net.women (passive because you wouldn't
expect anything there to last that long, unlinke net.announce or
mod.announce.newusers) Below is a list of six articles I found, the
search consisted of all articles I had on my system that were posted
before the month of June this year. My default expiration date is 14 days:

article id		    date posted			expiration date
--------------------------  ----------------------      ----------------------
<316 at phred.UUCP>	     1 May 86 04:38:28 GMT	31 Dec 99 06:00:00 GMT
<279 at ubu.warwick.UUCP>	    10 May 86 18:51:09 GMT	 1 Aug 86 00:00:00 GMT
<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
<132 at sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>   7 May 86 12:38:30 GMT	21 Dec 99 02:00:00 GMT

I would like to hear from the people who posted these, why they
set such extrenuous (1 Aug 86 isn't as bad as 31 Dec 99) expiration
dates.

(Yes, I *do* know about "-I" on expire, that's not the point).
-- 
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   /   \		Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL
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