Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!paris.ics.uci.edu!nagel
From: nagel@beaver.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Auto-expiration of news
Message-ID: <1026@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 88 07:56:40 GMT
References: <1066@psuhcx.psu.edu> <2694@sultra.UUCP>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: nagel@beaver.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel)
Organization: University of California, Irvine - Dept of ICS
Lines: 40
In-reply-to: dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan)

In article <2694@sultra.UUCP>, dtynan@sultra (Der Tynan) writes:
|
|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?). Then, rnews as part of its processing, would look at this
|flag, and if necessary, dump the article.

I'd prefer that if we are going to be adding a field to the active file, then
the field should be the last access date of each newsgroup.  This is for
these reasons:

  1. not everybody uses a news reader that uses .newsrc (e.g. vn, Gnews)
  2. many people use a distributed news system with a central
     server that makes it tough to tell who reads what.

If the field was interpreted as "avg number of requests per day", then
you get even more information so you can regulate expiration even
better.  Of course, all of this would seem to require that the active
file become a non-readable entity, with some function of inews or
whatever needed to get information from the active file so that it can
be updated correctly.  Or great cooperation from all the news readers
out there.  From this viewpoint, the cron method is superior.

I'm definitely in favor of anything that automatically trims groups
that are unpopular.  Any such scheme must be used carefully by
non-leaf nodes so that news can pass through to downstream feeds (I
use "must" loosely here, given the nature of the net).

Mark Nagel @ UC Irvine, Dept of Info and Comp Sci
ARPA: nagel@ics.uci.edu              | radiation: n. ... 2. smog with an
UUCP: {sdcsvax,ucbvax}!ucivax!nagel  | attitude.