ProNews/2 bug

[John Varela]

To whom it may concern (Trevor?):

Reporting a bug.

Someone started a thread, quoting a posting from someone else, who
had asked about the (supposed term) "computer bootlaces" (instead of
bootstraps) and crossposted it to alt.usage.english and
alt.folklore.computers. Both those groups are known for creating
long threads, sometimes extending into the hundreds or even
thousands of posts. This one has been further crossposted, the topic
has drifted, and the total postings have now grown to something like
10,000 posts or maybe more in the parent thread plus several long
daughter threads.

That was background information.

I finally decided to filter that thread and a couple of its spawn.
This was the first time I had ever filtered a thread.

Soon I noticed that, where I was used to getting two or three
hundred new posts every day in alt.usage.english, I was getting less
than a hundred. Alt.folklore.computers was similarly affected and
then the affliction spread to other groups.

I deleted the thread filters to no avail; the number of daily posts
dwindled until one day I got only two new posts in aue, less than 1%
of the usual harvest.

As an experiment, I subscribed to a different news server and had
the same results, pinning the problem on the news reader, not the
server.

I restored the entire OS/2 virtual machine from the October 1
backup, before the threads were filtered. That solved the problem.

Conclusion: something is very wrong with thread filtering, at least
for extremely long threads.

[A.D. Fundum]

Post by John Varela
Conclusion: something is very wrong with thread filtering, at
least for extremely long threads.

I'ld use other filter conditions anyway like the ones in FUD4SOUP,
using the MessageID of the first known message failing to meet the
filter conditions. Another bug is perhaps more annoying, often having
to scroll down to be able to expand the '+'.

Anyway, your filter conditions and settings (Delete?) may matter.

AFAIK the number of entries (example included below) in the
\ProNews\Headers\*.XRF file matches the number of displayed headers,
for example, which perhaps can be used to distinguish between some
corrupted files, exceeded limits and application errors. That may be
important because fixing broken files may not require having to have
access to its source.

CMD.EXE one-liner, change the newsgroup (once) and file (twice). Some
counting GREP may even work better:

rexxtry say
countstr('alt.british.apostrophy.society',charin('0313435e.xrf',,strea
m('0313435e.xrf','c','query size')))

Please note I haven't studied the file format used by ProNews, but
this just seems to be an easy way to verify the number of displayed
headers/messages.


--