Path: utzoo!censor!becker!bdb
From: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Re: Call for Calm, Re: Repeated messages, Haunted News-feeds
Message-ID: <730@becker.UUCP>
Date: 5 Aug 89 04:05:40 GMT
References: <1989Aug3.115302.12807@tmsoft.uucp>
Reply-To: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Distribution: can
Organization: G. T. S., Toronto, Ontario
Lines: 44

In article <1989Aug3.115302.12807@tmsoft.uucp> mason@tmsoft.UUCP (Dave Mason) writes:
|If you see your favourite antagonist repeating arguments that you've
|already brilliantly refuted, please check the Date: of the posting (the
|v command in rn will show the full header) and the Path:.  If it's
|more than a week or so old, and/or has
|	tmsoft!mcl!ncc!...!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu
|in the path, please ignore it as long lost news that's come back to
|haunt us.
|
|  It appears no-one in the Toronto backbone is keeping 2 weeks of
|history file any more, so this has also occurred in other groups than
|can.general.  In the other groups, the characteristic is a Path:
|that's 20+ sites long.

	This is a very recurrent problem in most local
	newsgroups. It happens to exercise a serious bug
	in the B News history lookup as well - so even
	if you have the article's message-id in your history
	file, you still have a good chance of ending up with
	a duplicate. Arghhhh...

	I understand that alpha C News didn't implement the
	concept of a history file keeping records of expired
	articles, so if one expired at say 5 days, then 6+
	day propogation loops could easily occur.
	I believe that the C News release DOES support this,
	so I urge people to use this feature to keep history
	records for at least 2 weeks!

	Both B News users (such as myself) and alpha C News
	users would probably benefit from the upgrade.
	There is a patch to B News which is supposed to fix
	the duplicate problem, but I can't say if it works -
	it's supposed to be effective however.
	I have ended up waiting for C News to stabilize
	with dbz et. al. and then will cut over to it on
	all my machines...

Cheers,
-- 
   __	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ont.
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