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In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> In lugnet.admin.general, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> > Can you move the articles that are in groups about to go bye bye for now
> > to higher in the hierarchy? Or mail them back to the authors and suggest
> > reposting?
>
> Most of the messages are of the "anyone here?" type, but I'll probably mail
> the authors with the URLs of their messages so they can find them easily if
> they want to repost them elsewhere. They'll probably actually stay around
> in the web archive as well.
I wrote a lot of probably's there because I knew I hadn't thought it through
carefully yet at that point. Here's where things stand now, of late
Wednesday night/early Thursday morning, 2:30 a.m. EST:
All 76 of the fourth and fifth level UK newsgroups have been removed from
the listing of active newsgroups. This keeps all of the article files
intact (for now), but only removes the groups from the list of valid groups.
This is all set and perfect then for mail and news, but it's causing some
problems in the web interface, which wasn't written with deleting groups in
mind, since it's an archive thingy, after all.
Anyway, here's the problem: First, the article display code has some
range checking code -- it peeks at the active list in the newsserver for
article counts so it knows when and how to truncate a range so it doesn't
try walking off the end of a group. Since the deleted groups are no longer
in the active list, it no longer can retrive the count of articles in the
group (because the group is gone!). I could work around that by looking up
the article count of a dead group some other way, but I don't feel like
doing that much work just to preserve a collection of basically "anyone
here?" types of messages.
Second, even if I did add special code to preserve the articles in the web
interface, they'd still present more cans of worms: the post-a-reply button
has to be shut off, or an explanatory message given if it's clicked; the
inter-group links would take people to non-existant areas on the website
(well, the areas still exist, but there aren't any real articles there --
there's no sense in keeping around the two automated posts for every group --
they're just an eyesore when you click into a dead group).
Third, these obsolete articles from dead groups get in the way when going
back over hierarchical article log listings -- the special thingies that
coalese multiple groups in a hierarchy into a single virtual group. If the
obsolete articles aren't deleted, then the coalesced logs still show numbers
indicating falsely that there's something there to read (yeah, there's stuff
there, but in dead groups -- we don't want people going there for old news --
only for links later when those go in).
So I think I'm going to just go wipe out all of the actual articles. (I'll
save copies in a special area just in case we ever need them again, but I'll
move them "out of range" of what the web interface can see.) This will
dramatically reduce the potential confusion of leaving around a couple dozen
orphaned articles.
--Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Collapsing the lugnet.loc.uk hierarchy
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| (...) Most of the messages are of the "anyone here?" type, but I'll probably mail the authors with the URLs of their messages so they can find them easily if they want to repost them elsewhere. They'll probably actually stay around in the web (...) (25 years ago, 17-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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