Re: [OT] Newsgroups Support for "Cancel", "Supersede", etc.

[Chris Croughton <chris@keristor.net>]

On Mon, 16 May 2005 06:28:50 +0100, Roy Schestowitz 
   <newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:

> At risk of being off-topic here, I have noticed that on some newsgroups
> (perhaps newsreaders or servers) do not honour some available
> functionality. I got replies to superseded messages and I began to look for
> explanations. I have not been successful so far. I'd be grateful to anyone
> who can clarify. Is "supersede post" a deprecated notion (i.e. am I causing
> clutter by using it)? Is it more of a wish-list feature that is not
> globally supported?

There are a number of reasons "Supersede" and "Cancel" don't work
universally:

  Some servers refuse to action them because of abuse (forged messages
  trying to usurp a poster's messages).

  Some servers disallow them as a matter of policy ("we accept
  everything and get rid of nothing").

  Propagation delays (what if a '"Supersede" or "Cancel" arives before
  the message it is supposed to delete?  The message may have been
  deleted 'upstream' so it can't keep the information around forever).

  Propagation of cancels is not universal (servers which don't act on
  them often don't propagate them).

  Few clients honour either (many don't see cancels at all), so if the
  user gets the message into their local newsbase before the server has
  deleted the original they will still see the original.

Even in its heyday they were more of a "wish" than a command for several
of those reasons, now they are all but useless and certainly can't be
relied on to work.

Chris C