On Mon, 3 May 2021, yeti wrote:

What about expiration?
Isn't it a shame that lots of nice stuff will vanish after some months?

I suppose you are referring to this thread [1]; that time was
a misconfiguration, which have been fixed. Anyway...

Current Tildeverse Netnews' default article expiration window is 3 years.
So every existing article in tilde.* namespace, without explicit
expiration date, posted on this network from 19-Sep-2019 onward [2]
are retained, at least until before 19-Sep-2022 [3].

The expiration window was extended from one year to three years [2]
on my request; and one of the main reasons that it got approved
is the minuscule size of the entire articles set. (The entire tilde.*
newsgroup article set was 300 KiB [4][5] back then)

Today, the size of entire tilde.* newsgroup article set is around 1.1 MiB,
so I will say that it is very possible that the expiration window would
get extended again (probably to 5 years) before any actual expiration
would occur.

(Ideally, I'm all for the "never" as the default expiration setting;
but I do understand why admins feel the need to take account of the actual projection of news spool size over time. It is just that [I think]
this information has never been properly collected and documented before,
until I posted my account of Tilde.club news spool restoration [4] that is)

And lastly, it goes without saying that, for these reasons, I'm serious
about warning people against putting binary attachments in their posts;
because the size of the news spool is going to be the main consideration
of the admins when they are going to extend the expiration window
next time.

Sincerely,
~xwindows


P.S. Maybe I should make a quarterly (or monthly) "State of the News"
post with ASCII art graph projecting the total tilde.* news spool size,
article count, and diagram of current peering topology.

-----

[1] "expiring too fast" [2020-09-14T10:25:27Z]
<nntp://news.tilde.club/local.test/139>
<news:1zimcg4puw.fsf@tilde.institute>

[2] This magical cutoff date of 19-Sep-2019 came from the date
I was fixing Tilde.club news spool (18-Sep-2020)
counted backward for 365 days.

This is because 18-Sep-2020 is also the day that expiration window
got extended from 365 days (1-year) to 1095 days (3-year),
Back at that date, the timeline went back further for only one year;
so after the extension, the current timeline goes back
to that data available at that point.

"Tilde.club newspool now restored" [2020-09-18T11:59:59Z]
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.club/9>
<news:alpine.LFD.2.23.451.2009181832080.2046475@tilde.club>

[3] As a reference point: following is the oldest article
in tilde.* namespace available from Tildeverse Netnews'
distribution point (cosmic.voyage) at the time I was fixing
improper expiration window on Tilde.club last year [2]; it still is
being the oldest article available in tilde.* namespace today:

"Re: News services" [2019-09-19T14:00:12Z]
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.services/36>
<nntp://cosmic.voyage/tilde.services/16>
<news:slrnqo72fc.18n.tomasino@cosmic.voyage>

If this article disappeared, then it would be the sign that
something started to expire.

[4] "A copycat recipe for suck-feeding from Tildeverse NNTP newspool"
[2020-09-25T08:58:58Z]
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.club/23>
<news:alpine.LFD.2.23.451.2009251556480.2030507@tilde.club>

[5] "Re: Size of tildeverse [Was: A copycat recipe for suck-feeding
from Tildeverse NNTP newspool]" [2020-09-26T13:54:12Z]
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.club/29>
<news:alpine.LFD.2.23.451.2009262051270.3574854@tilde.club>
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2021-05-05, xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:

On Mon, 3 May 2021, yeti wrote:

What about expiration?
Isn't it a shame that lots of nice stuff will vanish after some months?

Today, the size of entire tilde.* newsgroup article set is around 1.1 MiB,
so I will say that it is very possible that the expiration window would
get extended again (probably to 5 years) before any actual expiration
would occur.

Yes, I'll likely expand the expiration on Cosmic before we hit the 3
year mark.

(Ideally, I'm all for the "never" as the default expiration setting;
but I do understand why admins feel the need to take account of the actual projection of news spool size over time. It is just that [I think]
this information has never been properly collected and documented before, until I posted my account of Tilde.club news spool restoration [4] that is)

Never expiring is also a possibility if we keep the size reasonable.

And lastly, it goes without saying that, for these reasons, I'm serious
about warning people against putting binary attachments in their posts; because the size of the news spool is going to be the main consideration
of the admins when they are going to extend the expiration window
next time.

Our peering settings are explicit to only allow text to flow between
tildes. I'm not sure if we're set up to disallow binary posting in local groups, but do be aware that if you post binaries they won't go from
tilde to tilde.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2021-05-05, xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:

Today, the size of entire tilde.* newsgroup article set is around 1.1 MiB,
so I will say that it is very possible that the expiration window would
get extended again (probably to 5 years) before any actual expiration
would occur.

Since the size is so small at the moment I assume all the news is still archived on the server somewhere but is just not served to the users. I have
no idea how Usenet actually works so idk. I think even if we keep
expiration the old articles should be available somewhere after
expiration. Giving an option to shift through old stuff through a different way might be a good idea.

(Ideally, I'm all for the "never" as the default expiration setting;
but I do understand why admins feel the need to take account of the actual projection of news spool size over time. It is just that [I think]
this information has never been properly collected and documented before, until I posted my account of Tilde.club news spool restoration [4] that is)

I am also for the never being the expiration date. Clients should be responsible for setting a max download when they try to download the entire newsgroup. We can setup a rate limit on articles being consecutively
download to something like 500 from the server side as well if that is
an option.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2023-12-10, yeti <yeti@tilde.institute> wrote:

Usenet is a set of groups/hierarchies that may be delivered by several transports. NNTP just is one of them.

Where can I get Usenet over IPoAC?

~rdh
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113