mason@tmsoft.uucp (Dave Mason) (08/03/89)
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. If the article isn't that old, then your favourite antagonist is rehashing old material and you should feel obligated to flame them viciously ... such as point fingers at their heritage, disparage the province in which they were born/live ... oops, I just realized that that's what the articles with *content* have been lately :-). ../Dave
bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker) (08/05/89)
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. w \cc/ Internet: bdb@becker.UUCP, bruce@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu `/r/-e BitNet: BECKER@HUMBER.BITNET _< \_ Does a bovine bricklayer == a mu meson? - E. Farmi