[nos-bbs] Old BIDs

[Michael Fox - N6MEF]

I was contacted yesterday by an FBB sysop because a bunch of old (> 1 year)
WP bulletins have been flooding him.  The source of the old bulletins is
probably someone restoring an old backup.

 

But the issue is that they're being forwarded around the net over RF links.
According to the FBB sysop, FBB immediately expires them upon receipt.  So
it does not forward these old bulletins to others.  But, evidently, other
BBSs do not do that.

 

My understanding of JNOS is that expiry occurs as an "at" job.  I currently
run it twice a day.  But even if it ran every hour, it still wouldn't stop
such forwarding, since I might receive an old bulletin one minute and then
connect to many other BBSs before the next hourly expiry function.

 

One way to stop it would be to keep longer history.  I currently have JNOS
set to keep 6 months of history.  But even a whole year of history wouldn't
have stopped the current case because the bulletins were > 1 year old.

 

Back in the 80s, CPU power and disk speed were not the same as today.  With
the capabilities of today's machines, I'm wondering if it makes sense for
JNOS to perform expiry on the fly.  That is, it would use the current
rewrite process to determine the destination mailbox, and then look up the
expiry interval for that mailbox, and, if the message is expired, then not
save it to the mailbox.

 

Perhaps there is another way?

 

Michael

N6MEF

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