🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <19921008192004.h198@hosp.med.umich.edu> <h198@hosp.med.umich.edu>  (Gene Mangum) writes:
>... I'm writing a DOS newsreader client and I have a question
>that I haven't been able to answer by RTFRFC.   My question is: What
>is the maximum article number within a newsgroup, and what happens
>when a group reaches that max?   Do the numbers wrap to 1 or are the
>existing articles renumbered?

There is no maximum.  In principle, the numbers continue to grow without
limit.  In practice, when they get big enough to look negative when
stored in a 32-bit signed integer, we're probably in trouble.  That won't
happen for a while yet, though.  Even talk.politics.misc is only in the
early 100k range on utzoo (which has been on Usenet essentially since
the beginning).

(Note:  *don't* use a 16-bit integer for article numbers!)
-- 
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry