Re: 1st RfD: Mass-deletion of moderated groups without a moderator

Winston <wbe@ubeblock.psr.com.invalid> wrote:

Big-8 Management Board wrote:

               REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
 
This is a formal Request for Discussion (RFD) to remove the
following 101 moderated newsgroups. 

 
On 08.01.2025 10:28 Uhr Steve Bonine responded:

When these groups are removed, the history associated with the
contents of the group will disappear.  I do not know how much this
matters. There are cases where someone doing research could use the
information, but it is rare.  But when it's gone, it's gone.

>

Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> replied:

Those groups were mostly unused more than 10 years, most servers won't
carry any articles anymore.

 
I think the concern is a bit different: there are some hosts that try to
archive the entire history of their chosen set of newsgroups (e.g.,
non-binary groups) and that have articles from, say, 21 years ago or
more.  If removing a newsgroup makes that history unavailable, that's a
concern.  ISTM that deleting a newsgroup, and the archive host honoring
that delete control message, would make articles in that group
unavailable via NNTP, so the archiver would have to set up an alternate
way of accessing the old articles, even assuming they were careful
enough to preserve the articles when the group is deleted.

Yes. On Ausics, which doesn't expire articles, I've been
subscribing to some dead groups just to gradually read through the
old articles. Converting abandoned moderated groups to unmoderated
(with a post in each group explaining the change and risk of some
servers not implementing it) would be better in this regard.

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