Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Duplicate articles from B news site - would C news help ?? Message-ID: <1990Nov27.172848.25176@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1990Nov22.175142.18296@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Tue, 27 Nov 90 17:28:48 GMT In article andy@xwkg.Icom.Com (Andrew H. Marrinson) writes: >>... at least one incident recently of a combination of software oddities >>causing repeated posting of articles which *looked* similar but were really >>different articles, with different message-IDs... > >Can you tell us a little more about this weird combination? It was a combination of an obsolete version of C News that, in certain circumstances, fouled up headers slightly, and an overly-helpful B News that inserts a message-ID header if there isn't one. So each B News site that got the original article turned it into a "new" article. (Sites running modern C News discarded the original as illegal, but there were enough B News sites that got it to produce considerable proliferation.) >We are a >leaf site getting our feed only from uunet, and almost have the >articles arriving here recently have been rejected as duplicates... If articles are being rejected as duplicates, then they really *are* duplicates, and the "weird combination" business is entirely irrelevant. >... running C news (with libdbm, not dbz -- is that a problem?). I >investigated this further today trying to figure out if it was my >problem or someone else's (uunet?). Barring the unlikely possibility that your C News is rejecting things that it shouldn't be, the problem is at your feed site. Uunet is in the middle of some hardware transitions, I believe, and things may be a bit confused. Running dbm instead of dbz is slow, but should not break anything. -- "I'm not sure it's possible | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology to explain how X works." | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry