Basil Chupin said the following on 04/21/2012 09:54 AM:
I think there is a Cancel/Rescind Message option in NNTP, but I don't believe very many news-servers support(ed) it.
You may be right but remember that I (at least) am talking about something which was in place some 20+years ago when AARNet was "all the rage". And I was using a BBS software which was ahead of its time - not popular but ahead of its time. And things have changed somewhat in the intervening period. I am still subscribed to a few newsgroups and just checked for new messages - and after about 7 months of not downloading posts in these newsgroups I got 6 messages in all :-) . Quite a different story to what used to happen 20 years ago :-) .
Twenty years ago (1992) the 'workld wide web' was in its infancy and most of the digerati used was 'netnews' or whatever the local slang term term for NNTP was. Its flood-fill algorithm meant that posting propagated very quickly though the network. Remember, also, that this was the early days of the commercial internet. We weren't drowning in SPAM, SCO was a respectable supplier of small system UNIX and Microsoft wasn't a heavyweight in networking. 'Netnews' ran, for the most part, on university-owned machines that were running "C-news", which was written by Henry Spencer and Geoff Collier of The University of Toronto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_News Apart from being excellent performing software C-News was excellently written and Henry and Geoff held it up as an example of good coding and software design. Its portability, resilience and maintainability and overall lack of problems was a testimony to that. Henry went on to replicate all of the AT&T C library as open source and a lot more ... http://www.seebs.net/c/10com.html Many of those apply to other languages and to this present day http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/henry.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer RFC-850 has provision for news articles to "expire" (2.2.5) and for "control messages" (2.2.7). Section 3 of RFC-850 details the control messages, among which is <quote> 3.1 Cancel cancel <message ID> If an article with the given message ID is present on the local system, the article is cancelled. This mechanism allows a user to cancel an article after the article has been distributed over the network. </quote> -- I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. -- Douglas Adams -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org