Understanding Article Expiration

NetWare^® News Server stores discussion group articles in the local spool directory. You determine how long you want to store articles on disk. How long you store articles in a discussion group depends on the following factors:

• Your disk capacity: How much disk space you have determines how many articles you can store at a given moment.
• The number of articles posted to a discussion group: If the number of articles posted daily to a particular discussion group is very large, you might need to frequently expire articles in the discussion group.
• The content of articles: If the content of the discussion group is critical to your organization, you might never expire articles in the discussion group. If the content is not particularly critical, you might want to expire the articles of the discussion group frequently.

When you no longer want to store an article, News Server uses the Expire program to remove the article. The Expire program purges articles from your spool and purges references from the HISTORY file as indicated by your configuration settings. When the News Server performs its daily maintenance tasks, it checks the expiration policies and expires articles accordingly.

You might want to run Expire if you are running out of disk space, or you have modified your expiration policies and you want to immediately run Expire according to the new policies.

You can specify a default expiration policy for all discussion groups, or you can specify a custom expiration policy for a specific discussion group.