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UTORnews: Expiration Policy Whoever said that death and taxes were the only constants in life certainly never had any experience as a news administrator! It is the very nature of news to flow and fill available space, often at astonishing rates! Think of how unruly that stack of newspapers gets if you get behind on your reading! It is because of the sheer volume of news (approximately 7,000 newsgroups) and limited storage disks that we must set expiration time on news articles. Here is our current expiration policy which shows at what point we delete articles from the news spool: The "standard" newsgroup hierarchies (comp, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk) expire after 4 days if moderated, 2 days if unmoderated. There are some exceptions: comp.binaries, due to its high volume, expires after 1 day on the spool. news.announce.newusers is a particularly important group for new users; articles in this group expire only after 45 days. The higher traffic "alt" hierarchy expires after 3 days if moderated, after 2 days if unmoderated. alt.binaries is an exception due to its high volume and expires after 1 day on the spool. The regional hierarchies (bc, kw, mtl, ott, uw, uwo) expire after 4 days. The local "ut" (University of Toronto) newsgroups expire after 30 days. All other newsgroups expire after 1 day.