Odd newsgroup behaviour

David Schultz

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Feb 13, 2021, 11:19:25 AM2/13/21

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Recently I have seen some odd things going on.

Three times now about 20,000 or so recent messages in a group
(alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.dr_demento) that I had marked as read (reader
is Thunderbird) suddenly appeared as unread. The message dates are still
from 16 January or before so they aren't new.

Then today I noticed that many groups, including ...demento had their
latest message number recycled back to 1.

Another problem that I have been seeing is missing messages. One client
I use fetches headers to find multi-part posts and then fetches those
bodies by message number. But sometimes the response is that the message
doesn't exist.

I have also seen this with nzbperl.pl.

So several different clients all having problems.

Complaining isn't going to help as Earthlink customer support is
clueless and Giganews will only respond to their paying customers.

--
http://davesrocketworks.com
David Schultz

Ant

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Feb 13, 2021, 9:28:40 PM2/13/21

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I saw this in tin sometimes. I either had to to download headers and
then mark all read or just mark the group read without downloading any
headers. It's wacked. :(

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David Schultz

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Mar 26, 2021, 6:45:48 PM3/26/21

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On 2/13/21 10:19 AM, David Schultz wrote:
> Another problem that I have been seeing is missing messages. One client
> I use fetches headers to find multi-part posts and then fetches those
> bodies by message number. But sometimes the response is that the message
> doesn't exist.
>

I poked around a bit (fun with telnet) and found one problem.

The NNTP command xhdr returns information from multiple headers. Oddly
it returns information for articles which the head and body commands
return a 430 error for.

So we have the situation where articles are there but not there.

An example:

xhdr message-id 34061180-34061190
221 message-id fields follow
34061180 <uSBYH.117461$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
34061181 <uSBYH.3383$2c5....@fx19.iad>
34061182 <jSBYH.117441$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
34061183 <nSBYH.117449$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
34061184 <vSBYH.3384$2c5....@fx19.iad>
34061185 <vSBYH.117463$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
34061186 <fSBYH.117432$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
34061187 <sSBYH.3379$2c5....@fx19.iad>
34061188 <wSBYH.3386$2c5....@fx19.iad>
34061189 <wSBYH.117464$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
34061190 <wSBYH.117465$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
.
head <nSBYH.117449$Jc7....@fx18.iad>
430 no such article

David Schultz

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Feb 14, 2022, 10:43:07 PM2/14/22

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The problems just keep getting worse. I whipped up some HTML to describe
them: http://davesrocketworks.com/electronics/usenet/index.html

Ant

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Feb 14, 2022, 10:57:54 PM2/14/22

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In alt.provider.earthlink David Schultz <david....@earthlink.net> wrote:

> The problems just keep getting worse. I whipped up some HTML to describe
> them: http://davesrocketworks.com/electronics/usenet/index.html

Nice investigation. I also noticed several text articles not found in
tin even in active newsgroups. I rarely do binaries from ELN's GN
anymore since they don't have all newsgroups. I'm surprised ELN still
keeps its outsource usenet service. :O
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