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From: kre@ucbvax.ARPA (Robert Elz)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: The Great Net Cleanup Part II
Message-ID: <9935@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 08:44:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.9935
Posted: Fri Aug 16 08:44:35 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 01:27:11 EDT
References: <696@gatech.CSNET> <697@gatech.CSNET> <813@gatech.CSNET>
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 34
Summary: A good reason for deleting "dead" groups

I would have thought that someone would have remarked on this before,
but, apparently not.

A while back someone said that if there was some fixed limit to the
number of newsgroups, that would justify (in his opinion) removing
dead groups, but otherwise he preferred keeping them.

Well, big surprise people, there is just such a limit, in every version
of news I have seen (up to, and including 2.10.3).

The limit is on the number of characters in all the newsgroup
names concatenated together (including separators).  On ucbvax
the active file is currently about 60% there already (of the
limit in 2.10.3 - I have a vague memory that the limit was
set smaller in older versions).

True, this is a configurable number, sites can change it,
but I bet almost no-one has.  And the way its used, the
net effect is that the smallest limit out there wins.

Asking people to recompile news with a bigger number (even
if its possible due to restricted memory sizes on some
archaic processors) won't get us anywhere - from the dates
of some of the news versions people are still using, the
source must have gone mouldy & been discarded well before now.

Its possible that this limitation might be removed in some
future version of news, but getting people to upgrade is
impossible.

Thus, if we want to keep making new groups, we simply *must*
get rid of some of the old ones.

Robert Elz			ucbvax!kre	kre@monet.berkeley.edu