response 3 of 44:

Jul 27 06:09 UTC 1995

   I have to say that I'm against this idea.  Grex already has
one of the more liberal account deletion policies on the planet,
and a lot of people don't expect something as long as a 90 day
period.  While I am sympathetic to the idea that someone might
not want their account deleted, a) they can always be created
again (though there is a slight chance their login will be reused
by someone else), b) they could have asked us for an extended
period of time as some people did.

   There are some technical reasons to not suspend reaping, too.
On average, each account reaped returns 17K of space back to
/var/spool/mail, thus making the approximately 2,000 accounts
not reaped during August add up to a rough total of 18M of disk
space that might not be available on the mail spool area.

   Although other staff people don't agree with me on this, I
personally believe that the disk instability problems we've
had lately are somewhat related to the amount of space used on
/home, and not reaping accounts will (potentially) excerbate
that problem.

   Programs like PicoSpan are slower for newcommers to run, since
PicoSpan has to wade through the passwd file, and more entries
means more time needed to plow through.

   So, all-in-all, I'm of the opinion that while it would be nice
to be able to keep accounts around longer (remember when we didn't
reap for a whole *year*?), we're big enough that we really don't
have the resources to do this.

response 5 of 44:

Jul 27 06:20 UTC 1995

Those pleas in newuser certainly help, and also I've started nuking the
accounts of the worst mail abusers, which should help lower the average
quite a bit.

Re 2: Users weren't really informed about the reaping policy in any clear
way until maybe 2 months ago, when I added some text to newuser that talks
about the reaping policy.  I know we decided we wanted students to tell us
if they wanted their accounts to last through the summer, but I'm not sure
we ever found a way to clearly inform everybody that this was the policy.

response 7 of 44:

Jul 27 15:48 UTC 1995

I am one of the staffers who disagreed with STeve about this.
I believe the policy discriminates against students, especially those
whose only connection exists during the school year. We know that
there are many students on Grex, and yet we only have a handfule of
immortality requests. 

I seriously question whether any reduction in disk-full accomplished
by reaping these students a month before they come back to school will
make any difference in our disk instability.

It is only the mail spool argument that I have any trouble refuting.
If we do proceed to do this reaping, then I think it should be
recognized that it is our hopelessly inadequate mail spool partition
that has forced it to happen. As a long term policy, this stinks.
We should serve the community, and I think this policy fails to do that.

response 9 of 44:

Jul 27 21:27 UTC 1995

How is it discriminatory when anyone can ask not to get deleted?
 
I'm sure if there is infinite disk space, no one would have to get deleted,
and they could keep collecting mail from mailing lists long after they call
for the last time.  but, since there isn't infinite disk space, all the mail
they get and will never see is disk space that no one else can use.

since grex can't add a new hard drive every time the mail spool gets full,
and the majority of people who leave grex and never call again don't send mal
(mail) to staff telling them so, some people are going to have to get their
accounts deleted eventually.

response 11 of 44:

Jul 27 23:43 UTC 1995

It seems that a logical way to avoid this dilemma next year is to certianly
post announcements beginning in April explaining to all users that they
should take certain steps to perserve their account till the next fall.
IT would be as easy as an e-mail message to each user. I say the people who
dont respond by a certain date, get theri acoounts nuked. 

I agree that somone getting their account nuked wihtout prior notice 
would be angry for a while, but it is just as easy to get a new account.

response 13 of 44:

Jul 28 12:20 UTC 1995

(Actually, STeve does reaps almost daily, not once every 3 months.)
According to the calculations someone did on the back of a napkin at the board
meeting, /var/spool/mail would be a *lot* more cramped for space, to the point
where I'd be limiting people to maybe 1/2 the amount of mail they can
currently accumulate before I move their mail to their home directories.

I'm willing to do the extra work to keep /var/spool/mail usable, in order to
avoid reaping these students during the last month of the summer.  I'd like
to see us suspend reaping until mid-September.

response 15 of 44:

Jul 29 03:24 UTC 1995

I'd support extending the reap this time, but only because we have not made
our reap policy sufficiently well known. 

response 17 of 44:

Jul 29 16:44 UTC 1995

If the problem is mail spool space, why not nuke old mail (or move it to 
people's home dirs) without purging the whole account?
(Actually, I'd like to see mailers that don't encourage maintaining mail
in the spool file, but that's another story.)

response 19 of 44:

Jul 29 19:50 UTC 1995

        Excuse me. Being a little extra-nice to our student-people
is not something that should even be debated. I've yet to
hear anything short of bitching over the idea that we'd be making
an exception for one month.
        So what?
        The "problems" it will cause are all hypothetical, until we
try it, and then, if it is a problem, we simply never do it again.
        In the menawhile, anyone who's account is saved will be highly
appreciative of the thoughtfulness of grex, at this experimental move.
Maybe even enough to become a member.

response 21 of 44:

Jul 30 02:56 UTC 1995

(And the students whose accounts aren't reaped aren't going to be highly
appreciative.  They won't notice.  They'd only notice if they were reaped.)

response 23 of 44:

Jul 31 22:15 UTC 1995

        (odd-sided smile)
        Or extremely virtual. This is cyberspace, after all.
Well, now, if thy read coop, they'll be appreciative. Also, would it
be inappropriate to welcome back the students in the MOTD, noting
as an aside, that their accounts had been specifically spared?
I still must believe the P.R. will be worth it.