[plug] New PLUG news server

[James Devenish]

In message <s7rp22x24b.ln2 at innovative.iinet.net.au>
on Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 12:45:16PM +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> Not at all. The novel idea you appear to have is that somehow they
> can ascertain an explicit interest without seeing the header. :-)

We are obviously talking about different things, then, as the above
claim has never been my thought or intention. If you are interested
in a million articles, then there's no way around it. But if you
aren't interested, then you don't touch them and there is no delay.

> It's a real barrier until you alter the source code and
> rebuild leafnode.

Okay, you and I disagree on your use of the word "configurable".

> Yep. It's arbitrary in some ways. But valid in that the archived
> articles posted before the news server existed cannot logically be
> found in the newsgroup.

By that logic, we had better remove a lot of articles from the Mailman
archives!!! And Cameron had better dump his backdated off-top Lurker
archives!

> Each header takes a finite amount of time to transmit.

Then don't transmit them!

> Simply knowing that there are 52,678 (for example) messages
> available, how can you tell which ones you want to read?

You apply your own judgement. If you are interested in a sample of
50, then take a sample of 50 and see how you go. When you've read and
reconstructed the ones you're interested in, you can work your way
further backwards. If you don't care for the past, then go recall
ZERO messages of the messages and suffer no delays.