On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 01:21:32 -0800, murphydrj wrote:

I'll tell you where these 16 year old posts come from:

Actually, you didn't tell us anything on the sort - you merely moaned
about hard to find dates.

They certainly didn't come from an NNTP server, which seldom keep
anything for more than a year or so. Most news readers also expire old
articles. I use Pan, which has a server-dependent expiry period which
defaults to three months. The news reading experience is better if you
use a news reader: they are generally faster, have a better user
interface and, last but not least, usually have a decent kill-file
capability.

The usual suspect for old junk is some web-based news archiver like
Google Groups, formerly known as Deja Vu before Google bought and
disimproved it.

There are no dates on most of these, or if there are, they're hard to
find.

If you *must* use something like that to view current NNTP articles, it
really is your responsibility to check the date before posting.

One of my biggest internet pet peeves is this one.
EVERY posting should have a date, INCLUDING THE YEAR so we don't look
like idiots posting to messages left during the ice age.

I've got news for you: they do, so NNTP servers and readers know when to
expire old articles. Without dates you can't do this and an article
without a date will, hopefully, be treated as very old and expired
immediately.

Poorly designed and written news archivers and web apps, which operate
outside the limits of the NNTP protocol may or may not insist on dated
articles and can and will do what they please with dates. Let the user
beware.



--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |