ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated

[Ade Lovett]

"Jack De Winter" writes:
>
>Not arguing about how to do it, but can you give a couple of good reasons
>why we might want to get the last <x> amount of time of news from a
>newsgroup?

1.  I'm a dialup customer who, faced with metered local phone calls,
    reads news offline.  I'm interested in a bunch of groups, so the
    simplest thing for me to do is maintain a timestamp of when I
    last downloaded my articles, and use that to pull the next lot down.

2.  I'm browsing newsgroups looking for a particular topic, so I decide
    that I want, say, the last couple of days worth of articles
    pulled down, so I can take a peek at the group.  I neither know,
    nor care, at this stage whether its a high or low traffic group,
    where asking for, say, 10 articles might give me a few minutes of
    activity (if it were, say, *.jobs), or several days (if it were
    an infrequently-posted to newsgroup).

These are just examples of why the time concept which is part of
NEWNEWS makes the command useful -- there is already a substantial
thread discussing other 'must-have' aspects that can be provided
(with the current NNTP command set) *only* by NEWNEWS - I will not
repeat them here.

-aDe

-- 
Ade Lovett, Demon Internet, Austin, Texas.