[net.news.b] readnews problems

israel@umcp-cs.UUCP (10/02/83)

How do you cancel a message?  I accidentally posted three copies of
the same message to net.news, and I've been trying to cancel the
last two of them.  I've gone into readnews, gotten to the appropriate
messages, and then used the 'c' command to them.  This runs "inews"
which (a few minutes later) comes back with the message
 "inews: Not contributor: israel and israel@umcp-cs.UUCP (Bruce N. Israel)."

It seems that the first version is gotten from the file, and the second
one is generated for the caller, since I changed my finger entry to add
my middle initial (which I don't normally use).  I tried doing the
cancel command, as myself, in a "root" subshell, and in a "news"
subshell, but it told me the same error message each time.  I am getting
VERY frustrated.

Adding to my frustration is this other readnews problem.  When I wanted
to cancel those messages, I had to get to them in "readnews".  Since I
had already passed them in the normal course of events, I called
readnews with "readnews -x -n net.news".  This put me in the newsgroup
net.news.adm, AND NO OTHER GROUP!  I could "N net.news" to get there,
but "N" by itself just dropped me out of readnews.  I finally found
out that "readnews -x -n net.news !net.news.all" will work for getting
me into net.news itself, but I don't understand how telling it to
ignore certain newsgroups tells it to add some other group.  BTW,
I should point out that I do subscribe to net.news and all of its
sub-groups, and that I didn't touch my .newsrc while doing the above.

"Not to frustrated to forget to sign my name"

~~~ Bruce ~~~
Usenet: seismo!umcp-cs!israel   Arpanet: israel.umcp-cs@Udel-Relay