From: mjcr (mjcr@mindspring.com)
Date: Mon May 20 2002 - 11:47:41 CDT
On Mon, 20 May 2002, Charles MacDonald wrote:
> Actually, the intent of the Google Archive is probaly such that they
> would not want to act on superseds.
>
> I notice that My FAQs end up in long threads by themselfs, based on
> the title I guess, (or maybe the refernced generrated by the
> auto-faq headers.) Someone searching will get the latest post,
> (unless they are looking for something that was deleted)
>
>
> This is the Behavior that I should expect from an archive of that
> sort that attempts to round up ALL of usenet.
That is pretty much my take on the issue as well. If a maitainer does
want only his most recent version to be archived at google, they have
provided a precedure to remove older copies, and other no-longer wanted
copies. Besides the removal of older copies, if a maintainer wants their
FAQ to not be included in the google archives at all, he could use the
X-No-Archive header, but then the readers who depend on goolge as their
news provider will not see that document at all. For me, google's is
operating as I would expect it to for archival of articles posted.
<start of OT rant>
I do have a problem with google's honoring of the X-No-Archive header,
since it facilitates disruption of newsgroups and abuse of the readership
of those newsgroups by the trolls and others disrupters and abusers to
hide their activity from the archives.
That header was created for a valid purpose, such as to keep the archives
from being cluttered with articles such as "For sale one slightly
used....", but it has become a favorite tool for abuser of the newsgroups
and hs cause confusion in the newsgroups.
For example: in comp.text.tex, once person who was quite abusive there
(and in other groups) used that header. At first he was asking for
assistance and the assistance was being provided to him. Latter he became
openly abusive. Before being openly abusive in that group others who were
using google to access news, failed to see his articles, and thought that
the other posters repling to him were talking to each other, at least two
persons made that complaint.
Besides his abusive textual messages, there was the matter of his sig.
His sig was overly large and was an ASCII art image of male private parts.
Latter when when he got bolder, he started attaching other people's email
addresses, with spam proctection removed, to his sig as though they were
his addressed. Since his headers did not contain a valid email address, a
number of individuals sent email complaining of his actions to the email
address in his sig. Two people found that abuse complaints was filed
against them by people who thought that the email address was his. One
person had his account suspended by his ISP for a while because of those
complaints. All the time he was using the X-No-Archive header and because
of it, he thought his misdeeds could not be proven after a week of their
posting, what he claimed his ISP's expire was set at.
I feel it would be better if google would configure the honoring or
ignoring of the X-No-Archive header on a group by group or hierarchy by
hierarchy basis. Such as ignored in comp.* but honored in
alt.for.sale.
<end of OT rant>
-- I run Linux, no bloody RedHat, Debian, Slackware, or Corel, just Linux. May all that you wish upon me and mine be visited upon you ten fold. ************************************************************* To unsubscribe send a message to as unsubscribe faq-maintainers fill-in-your-email-address-here *************************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Jul 03 2002 - 10:13:40 CDT