Aazure.422 net.news.b utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!teklabs!tekmdp!azure!stevenm Sat Jan 23 17:04:53 1982 Creeping Bit Rot in Bnews When I first installed the B news system, I was overjoyed at the great decrease in maintenance effort and user complaints over A news. I recent weeks, however, I have had an ever increasing number of users come to me with bizaare problems. I will briefly enumerate them: 1) the '.newsrc' lines getting article numbers wiped out. A line will go from 'foo: 1-30' to 'foo: 1,30-35', and the next session, the user will get 2-29 again. I believe that this has been mentioned before in the news. 2) '.newsrc' files being totally or partially wiped out. One person has about 20 lines deleted from his '.newsrc' with no warning. 3) A spate of old messages. Today, I got a raft of messages from the Jan 12, Jan 13, Jan 14 timeframe which we had already seen at our system. 4) 'checknews' gives 'readnews' an environment arg when the '-e' switch is invoked. I have a fix for this. 5) There is no apparent way for checknews to determine if an article which has not been read has been deleted. I expected the 'x's in the '.' files to be replaced with blanks or something when articles are deleted, but this is not being done. Also, I have a suggestion about the newsgroup proliferation issue: 1) when the total number of retained articles in a newsgroup goes to zero, remove the directory, and the entry in 'active'. 2) When a user reads news, remove any lines which do not have corresponding lines in the 'active' file. This will serve to clean out the active file, the news directory, and the user's .newsrc files. S. McGeady ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.