Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Salvador Mirzo Newsgroups: alt.fan.usenet,alt.culture.usenet,news.groups,rec.radio.amateur.policy Subject: Re: Usenet can be an archive of last resort for organizational bulletins when organizations can't/won't archive them Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 13:40:15 -0300 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 27 Message-ID: <87bjun9w9c.fsf@example.com> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 17:40:18 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="01e89bac3285d800d024642987689691"; logging-data="3358679"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX191NFGpWaWPaEVL8gMAvsvCMeBxyHw525A=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:006BVfR6P3OOwaN2K5hq0GwCb98= sha1:2hPvrW0b/YCF2LJEsf5br9r26Vk= Xref: csiph.com alt.fan.usenet:1033 alt.culture.usenet:395 news.groups:15386 rec.radio.amateur.policy:30840 Grant Taylor writes: >> Usenet can be an archive of last resort for organizational bulletins >> when organizations can't/won't archive them > > No, not really. Not in the way that most people think about an archive. > > Most news servers have limited retention. Usually somewhere between > days and years. But there is usually an upper bound on how long > things are retained for. > > Once you get past retention, then you have the problem of accessing > older articles. Quite right, Grant. It does seem important---or at least very neat---that we could log message-ids in papers or personal notes or something when we want to look up a post in the future. We have al.howardnight.net today (though it appears broken today). Sometimes I think about stopping everything I'm doing and focusing on building the best system I can built to make an all-time archive of USENET posts indexed by message-id. With a prototype in motion, perhaps we could find the resources to make it a reality.