I'm opposite again. Why would I want to keep around articles that I
have NOT read? I'd much prefer to let those sit on my ISP's server,
than on my own disk. So I make heroic efforts to read ALL articles
that I fetch. If I were to run "expire -r", it would wipe out all my
newsgroups. And that would eliminate the advantage of an archival
newsreader - the ability to revisit an article I've read before.
I don't usually know ahead of time which articles I'll want to go back
to. (If I *do* know, I use the 'o' command to preserve that article
in the appropriately categorized folder.) I choose keep dates in pro-
portion to the probability of wanting to review that newsgroup again.
And I run "expire -o" to 'manage' my local database size, even though
I know it will erase some article somewhere that I'll want to refer to
day after tomorrow. (At least, with search engines like AltaVista,
old newsgroup articles can be found again if absolutely needed.)
mikus
p.s. I have a philosophy difference with Chin. Some articles can be
clearly identified for discarding BEFORE the newsgroup's regular
expire date - for instance, if somebody posted the binary of a
copyrighted program to the newsgroup. I would like to see a Yarn
command (ctl-D, perhaps) which would "mark" that specific article
in a newsgroup for deletion. And a new "expire -d" capability,
which would get rid of those explicitly marked articles whether
they had been read or not.