Glen Berry wrote:
> If Chris created the archives sorted by year, I would only be downloading
> the headers for my possible future reference. Who knows, maybe one day I
> might even download an old message body or attachment.

 I passed on your earlier suggestion to Chris but I see some flaws in it
already. The biggest problem facing this server right now is available
space. If he simply moves the older messages to a different group there
is still the problem that the server does not have enough space to make
them available.

 What I think might work is an annual purge of older files. For example
once per year in the month of November we can announce that on Jan. 1
all message 1 year or older are about to go away. This will give everyone
a couple of months to decide if they want any of the resources from that
time period. Once Jan. 1 comes around they are gone. This will free up
server resources and keep groups sizes down to a managable level. It
is either that or Chris will impose automatic message expirations and
the group will continiously scroll. Each day a new batch of messages
will expire that are one year old.

  Then again it teaches us all a lesson that if there is a resource
posted here that we are interested in then we should take advantage
of it now instead of waiting for later time to do it. It does cause
me some problems because I often do search through older messages
trying to find answer or examples to new questions. Sometimes it
is just fun to go back through some of the earlier work posted here
for nostalgia's sake. I have seen a definate difference in the
quality of images posted here. While there was some good posts
in the early days of this server the posts in the last year have
improved consistantly since that time. I think it really proves
that peer support on news groups really works.

Comments ?

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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