Dear whattever-ga;
Thank you for allowing me an opportunity to answer your interesting
question.
This is a difficult matter that a lot of people have had to face and
I’m afraid you aren’t going to like what I’m about to tell you.
Because of censorship issues many system administrators or newsgroup
hosts tend to take a self-imposed hands-off stance when it comes to
monitoring, deleting and/or modifying posts. Just as the mainstream
media practices fair play and free speech policies the cyber media
also approaches the issue in the same manner, and in fact it can be
argued that they are even more tolerant and more keenly aware of their
responsibility to refrain from tinkering with posts than the hard-copy
variety of media outlets normally do. Most electronic media hosts are
staunch supporters of the hand-off notion and would resist even the
most persistent demands to make exceptions in anyone’s case.
Having said that, even if it were possible to find someone willing to
delete your messages, one compliant host would ultimately be fruitless
in your effort toward deleting the existence of your previous post
entirely. You see, millions upon millions of messages have been posted
to newsgroups and in doing so the messages are replicated by hundreds
if not thousands of servers around the world (this is known as
“propagation”). While you might have used only one news server to get
your message out to the world, you were actually feeding the
infrastructure of newsgroups with information. Finding each and every
copy of even one stored message would be like trying to find a million
needles in a million haystacks.
Take a look at this graphic. You will see (on a much smaller scale)
how your message might have eventually hit a number of servers so that
it could be accessible to millions of people in millions of locations:
HOW STUFF WORKS – INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm
You might also be interested in seeing how newsgroups work and it
should clearly explain how unlikely it is that one would ever hope to
remove every copy of a message posted to newsgroup servers:
HOW STUFF WORKS – NEWSGROUPS
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/newsgroup3.htm
As the policy of Google Groups itself, I recommend that you review
this page, which answers the question “How can I remove articles from
Google's archive?” While this probably won’t achieve all that you are
hoping to achieve entirely, it might go some distance toward removing
your messages from the view of a large portion of readers since Google
is one of the most popular engines in the world today and used by so
many people. Even so, since sites are regularly indexed it’s possible
that a copy of your message could even make it’s way back on the net
from another server and your efforts would have been of little value.
GOOGLE GROUPS HELP
http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/help.html#9
I’ll save you a little time and tell you up front that you will get no
help from Google in trying to get messages deleted from Usenet groups.
They simply don’t do that. To make matters worse, Usenet is a network,
not an organization, and there is simply no one out there to talk to
about removing a message. Some individual newsreaders allow for the
cancellation of posts but it tends to be very difficult if you don’t
understand how to do it. Third party cancellations are an even bigger
nightmare.
THE CANCEL FAQ
http://www.killfile.org/faqs/cancel.html#I.G
Here are some other articles that you might find informative on the
issue of removing newsgroup messages (or perhaps, the futility of it):
WHAT IS USENET?
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/
INDIANA UNIVERSITY KNOWLEDGE BASE
http://kb.indiana.edu/data/aewv.html?cust=11908
I hope you find that that my research exceeds your expectations. If
you have any questions about my research please post a clarification
request prior to rating the answer. I welcome your rating and your
final comments and I look forward to working with you again in the
near future. Thank you for bringing your question to us.
Best regards;
Tutuzdad-ga
INFORMATION SOURCES
Defined above
SEARCH STRATEGY
SEARCH ENGINE USED:
Google ://www.google.com
SEARCH TERMS USED:
“HOW DO I CANCEL” USENET
“HOW DO I CANCEL” NEWSGROUPS
“HOW DO I CANCEL” MESSAGES
“HOW DO I CANCEL” POSTS
"HOW DO I CANCEL" MESSAGE THREAD
I alternatively used the search terms “delete” and “remove” in place
of the search term “cancel”. |
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