Re: Why?

[dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <3hg07s$t50@news.rain.org>,  <avsystem@rain.org> wrote:
>    Why are some notices left on this board, or topic, for three months?  

You seem to have a confused notion of how Usenet works.

Each site stores all the messages locally for the groups it receives.
New messages posted to a group gradually propogate to other sites
(quickly for sites that are directly connected to Internet, slowly for
UUCP and other dial-up sites).

Each site has a limited amount of disk space available for storing
news articles, which will vary depending on how large the system is,
how important the newsgroups in question are (from the system
manager's perspective), and how many newsgroups are coming in.

Most sites have an automatic article expiry mechanism, whereby articles
that are more than a preset number of days old will be deleted
automatically.  Some sites may work on the basis of total space
required for a newsgroup, and start expiring old articles if too much
disk space is used.

In either case, the only reason articles will be hanging around on your
system for three weeks will be due to local configuration, and it has
nothing to do with anyone else on Usenet.  You should talk to your
system adminstrators.

You shouldn't miss articles because old ones are hanging around
(unless your site's news software is buggy).

There are special exceptions to the expiry mechanism: articles can
include a field in the header which specifies that they should expire
after a shorter (or longer) time.  This is mostly used for regular
automatic postings, such as the Frequently Asked Questions list (FAQ),
which is posted monthly, and is set to expire after a month.

> The 20 were posted in the first week in December and many have received 
> no response.  I can understand certain of them being left, as the new 
> "sound recording" post.  That is a very valuable post and should be left 
> permanently, but some characters idea of the "Top Ten GS Games!" leaves 
> me cold and clutters the board.  Our "free catalog" notices, which have 
> gotten several hundred responses, are routinely batted down in about a 
> week so don't tell us "It can't be done!"

Sounds like an odd configuration error at your site, or the articles
you mentioned have a very long expiry time specified in their header.
(This is usually regarded as a breach of Usenet "netiquette" rules.)

Incidentally, regarding your "free catalog" notices: I think we have
all got the message now.  You shouldn't keep posting another copy of
them every few days.  99% of the people on these groups will have
already read them, and you are just wasting bandwidth and other
people's money.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand