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Comment by hugothefrog | Hacker News Reader

I used to participate in Usenet a lot, back in the mid 90s. Rather stupidly, I set the no archive header (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive) on all my posts. Now I can only find myself quoted in replies.

Shame, really.

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Well, I didn't set the X-No-Archive header. And now there's no chance that I'll ever get elected to be President of the United States.

How about an X-No-Profits header?

Hmm, look at the glass half full. Someday when you're popular, people will find your Usenet remains and quote you on it. That's cool.

Same here. Sheesh, remember when we all used to use our full names when posting online?

Actually that's a nice way of filtering mailing lists nowadays. Posts worth reading and posts signed with the full name are almost the same ones... If you missed something really interesting from other posts, it will most likely be quoted later on anyways.

The privacy apocalypse is coming. People will stop caring, even more than they already have, and if someone can be elected* after repeatedly breaking campaign promises, then surely past behavior only matters as an excuse, rather than a reason.

* I don't have anyone specific in mind, here; politicians, all of 'em.

There was this griefer mythomaniac in the Swedish groups, who sent cancels on others' messages all the time when he couldn't answer (I assume with constructed headers so it wouldn't be removed on your local server).

He also did things like send cancels on people quoting his insulting stuff long afterwards, so they wouldn't show up with his name in Google.

I had read the rfc:s, but couldn't even imagine anyone would be so unserious at the time. Ah, innocence.

I don't know if Google still remove messages when cancels show up on Usenet, but you could try...

Edit: OK, I can't complain about the downvotes; it was a joke but it is arguably immoral to remove information.

Sorry! - Downvote was iPhone fatfingered mistake.

(For a group so enthusiastic about version control with a leader who pushed for etherpad's timeline document history, this one vote then lockin feels a bit out of character)

I upvoted to compensate. Good on you for explaining what happened.

An extra bit of room between those arrows would go a long way to solving that I think.

It would if you think I was going for the up arrow - I was actually going for the reply link of the parent post (yes, I had already zoomed in).

Indeed: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GhostOfUsenetPostingsPast

Shame? You think I want my offspring to know what my 20 year old-self posted on Usenet? Does anyone? :-)

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