Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!apple!vsi1!wyse!mips!sultra!dtynan
From: dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Auto-expiration of news
Summary: I thought of that :-)
Keywords: newsgroup propogation
Message-ID: <2702@sultra.UUCP>
Date: 5 Dec 88 20:52:02 GMT
References: <1066@psuhcx.psu.edu> <2694@sultra.UUCP> <8048@dasys1.UUCP>
Organization: Tynan Computers, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 27

In article <8048@dasys1.UUCP>, amb@dasys1.UUCP (A. M. Boardman) writes:
> In article <2694@sultra.UUCP> dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan) writes:
> >On the other hand, if someone subscribes to a currently unavailable group,
> >the daemon would reactivate it.  And vnews/readnews/whatever would inform
> >the reader that the group isn't currently carried, but will appear in a few
> >days.
>Under this system, how do you get articles to propogate to the rest of the net?
>
> A.M.Boardman  Big Electric Cat PA Unix  ![hoptoad|phri|(uunet)]!dasys1!amb

I thought of that already :-)  In *no* way, should the downstream sites be
'censored' by this system.  In the case of a batched newssite, inews would
continue to generate news batches for neighbours, but wouldn't save the
articles in the local news spool directory.  In the case of a non-batched link,
something similar could be done.  Since my original posting, I have gotten
some interesting feedback.  Amos Shapir suggested using a date field in the
'active' file, to see when the last time the group was read.  This is because
some people subscribe to certain groups, but haven't actually read them in
months.  Another possibility would be a 'count' field, for each newsgroup,
which reflected the number of people who had read the group.  Each week, then,
the cron utility would zero the counts.  Comments?
						- Der
-- 
	dtynan@zorba.Tynan.COM  (Dermot Tynan @ Tynan Computers)
	{apple,mips,pyramid,uunet}!Tynan.COM!dtynan

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