From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!utah-cs!sask!derek Newsgroups: net.news Title: News system proposal Article-I.D.: sask.205 Posted: Sat Feb 5 04:03:42 1983 Received: Sun Feb 6 07:31:18 1983 There seems to be a problem with expiring newsgroups. I would like to suggest the following method of storing news on a system to cure this. o There should be one directory on a system which contains all news items. Each news item is stored in its own file and the name of the file is the article ID. o There should be one file which contains a list of newsgroups to which the site may post news. This file exists under the present system and is called 'ngfile'. o There should be one history file for each newsgroup. This file contains the article ID, a date and sequence number for that date, and, an optional expiry date. o Each user has a file in his/her home directory indicating readnews options and which articles have been read by recording the date-sequence numbers. o The sys file, indicating to which sites news items are passed, exists in its present format. When articles expire, all reference to them is removed from the history files and the news file is deleted. When all items of a particular group have disappeared, then the group no longer exists. The current interfaces for posting news and reading news function as they do presently (and with any new features as they arise). Any comments? Derek Andrew U of Saskatchewan