BADEXPIRY(8CN)

NAME
badexpiry - find newsgroups with odd use of explicit expiry dates

SYNOPSIS
badexpiry [ mincount minsize ]

DESCRIPTION
Badexpiry reports (on standard output) newsgroups with suspicious patterns of use of explicit expiry dates in articles. Specifically, it reports groups with more than mincount (default 15) articles, more than 90% of all articles, or more than minsize (default 500) KB of articles having explicit expiry dates more than 10 days after their arrival dates.

Such reports are not necessarily indicative of abuses—for example, news.announce.newusers legitimately has most or all of its articles on long expiry—but investigation may be in order.

FILES
/etc/news/history
/var/news/*/*/...

SEE ALSO
news(5), newsdb(5)

HISTORY
Written for C News by Henry Spencer.

BUGS
The percentage and age thresholds ought to be settable.