Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!ncar!tank!gargoyle!jpusa1!stu
From: stu@jpusa1.UUCP (Stu Heiss)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Auto-expiration of news
Message-ID: <1022@jpusa1.UUCP>
Date: 2 Dec 88 17:04:09 GMT
References: <1066@psuhcx.psu.edu> <2694@sultra.UUCP>
Reply-To: stu@jpusa1.UUCP (Stu Heiss,6312,6334,)
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: JPUSA - Chicago, IL
Lines: 26
Summary:
Expires:

In article <2694@sultra.UUCP> dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan) writes:
-From article <1066@psuhcx.psu.edu>, by wcf@psuhcx (Bill Fenner):
-> 
-> Does anyone have a good way to expire news automatically when the news
-> partition gets full?
-I have a similar problem.  Having given it some thought, I have come up with
-a clean solution that (someday) I will implement in 2.11 (or whatever).
-Anyway, the idea is this.  In the NEWS/active file, a new field is introduced
-in the tradition of the 'm' field for 'moderated'.  It is a boolean ('y'/'n'?),
-which indicates that the given newsgroup is not read at this site.  In this
-way, a nightly (or weekly) cron program would zip through all the .newsrc
-files, to see what groups aren't subscribed to, and update the 'active' file.
-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.  Of course, certain groups (such as comp.mail.maps) would have a special
-mark saying that they must ALWAYS be subscribed to ('a' perhaps?).

We do something similar with a couple of shell scripts and no mods to the news
software - works quite nicely.  I use the previously posted script (inactng.sh)
to get a list of inactive (nobody reads them) newsgroups and rm the articles in
the associated directories.  In addition, we always junk 'junk' and never junk
'comp.mail.maps' and 'news.announce.important'.  See article in news.software.b
for the source to the two scripts.
-- 
Stu Heiss {spl1,uchicago.edu!gargoyle,ddsw1}!jpusa1!stu