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

Winston 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.

If the server processes the rmgroup in the standard way, you are correct that the group will no longer exist on that server, and any history that it contains will be lost.  I cannot speak for the actions of the server owner, but I suspect that someone who has invested the time to accumulate 21 years of history in a newsgroup might intercept the control message and set the group to read-only if that is an option for the news server they are using.

The group's history itself can still be found at the ISC ftp server,
all control messages, including descriptions, can be found there.

 I'm assuming ISC's history is the management history of the group, not
all the articles ever posted to the group.  I don't think that's the
history Steve is concerned about.

You're right, it's the contents of the group that may be the only place that some of the history of the Internet is documented.