This article is based on material authored by members of the news.newusers.questions Moderation Board and nnq-workers mailing list, particularly by Dennis D. Calhoun. The original article was last updated in 2005.

Disappearing articles

There are a couple of reasons why news articles need to "disappear".

Articles marked read in your newsreader

Your newsreader might hide the articles you have read, so that you won't have to wade through e.g. 100 articles you've already seen just to find 20 new ones. This behaviour depends on how your newsreader is set up.

Ways to mark articles "unread"

• In Netscape, there's a little green dot that disappears when you select the article to read it. If you click where the dot used to be, you can "unread" it and keep it on the screen.
• You may have a "show all articles" option listing that will show both the read articles and the unread ones. In Microsoft ® Outlook Express 6, this setting can be changed by going View > Current View > Hide Read Messages.
• You may also be able to "flag" an article so that you can easily find it again.

Expiring articles on your news server

News servers have a finite amount of hard disk space. This is why they must expire (remove) articles from time to time, in order to make room for new ones.

Example configurations

• Some servers might expire every article when it is 14 days old.
• Others might expire alt.* newsgroup articles after 4 days, while they will keep news.* articles around for 21 days.
• A similar tactic would be to allocate 10% of the total storage space to alt.*, another 10% to news.*, and to expire articles as their volume hits their predefined quota.
• Still other servers may expire articles once any newsgroup reaches 1000 kB worth of traffic, regardless of the amount or age of the articles.

How to locate an expired article

If a given article has expired from your news server, and you really want to read it, you need to obtain it elsewhere.

• You may find the article in Google Groups, or in some other archive.
• You might also be able to find a "public" news server where the article is still available.
• If you post a request to the newsgroup, perhaps either the author or someone else could mail you a copy of the article you want.
• Maybe one of your friends is lucky enough to have access to a news server with longer expiration times.