ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated
Ade Lovett
ade at demon.net
Tue Dec 2 15:24:17 PST 1997
"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.
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