🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <q63B435w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) writes:
>
>The expire software should examine the Expires: field for the postings in
>news.announce.newusers, *whether the system administrator asks it to or not*.
>
>In other words, if system administrators want to junk the
>news.announce.newusers postings, they should have to put in some effort to do
>so.
>
>This will decrease the number of "Help, where are the introductory articles?"
>postings which plague every newsgroup.

Not only "yes," but "Hell, yes."  I would extend that.  I would have
the software always examine the Expires: line whenever it is on any
moderated group.

The second half of the month, I always seem to get these loser
submissions from people who have not read the instructions for
comp.sys.amiga.announce (I moderate).  These are annoying for several
reasons.  First, I get lots of submissions that just aren't
appropriate.  Who enjoys rejecting people's efforts?  Second, for
those that are appropriate, I end up suggesting a lot of edits.
Third, and most importantly, messages submitted by the
"post-and-forward" method (as opposed to mailing them to the proper
submissions address, as per the instructions) invariably screw up the
aliasing mechanism my sysadmin was so kind as to give me.  When I am
out of town, these will not get forwarded to my backup moderator, and
will not be dealt with in a timely manner.  I like to have a 24-hour
turnaround for this group, so this is a real problem.

When I tell these folks that they need to go read the instructions,
they tell me they can't find them.  MOST annoying.

The Expires: line is so useless that the FAQ file for rec.games.hack
is simply re-posted very frequently (weekly or bi-weekly--I forget).
This rather defeats the intent of those systems that ignore the
Expires: line.

I don't know if Matthew's idea is the best way to deal with the
Expires: issue.  However, something should be done to make it work
better.

           Dan Zerkle  zerkle@iris.eecs.ucdavis.edu  (916) 754-0240
           Amiga...  Because life is too short for boring computers.