"riverman" wrote in
:


"Bob Arledge" wrote in message
...
A week or two ago I posted a message asking for information about
kayaking in the Tonkin Gulf, Vietnam. A few days later the message
disappeared from the newsgroup. Is there a moderator for this
newsgroup? Would he/she have deleted it? If so, why? Is there some
other way a post would disappear?



It still shows up on deja.com, so my guess is that maybe the problem is
in your computer settings? I did a 'catch up' yesterday, so I can't see
messages from before then, but I remember seeing your message, but
didn't notice it going away. Sometimes, the ghost in the machine
deletes messages before their expiration dates arrive; I don't think
anything malicious happened.

That's just how usenet works. Every news server can be configure to
"expire" articles after a certain amount of time. For many the expire time
is set for two weeks. When an article is expired it is deleted from the
server but that doesn't mean that it might not be available through a
different server, like Google groups which configures their systems so that
articles on their server never expire. Configuring a server such that
articles expire after a couple of weeks or less gives users a reasonable
chance to read new articles but doesn't require the massive amounts of disc
space to keep every article posted forever.

Most news clients will "mark" an article as read after you've seen it once
so that it's header is not downloaded to the client every time you run the
client. Otherwise, everytime you ran the news client you'd see the same
articles over and over until they expired. That would make it very
difficult to follow a busy newsgroup.