Re: [leafnode-list] Demon News Servers

[krasel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Cornelius Krasel)]

Carl Inglis wrote:

[demon news server apparently generates gaps in article numbering and
 fills them later]

> Stefan Wiens wrote:
> > An ugly workaround could be "fetchnews -x".
> 
> What does the "-x" flag do?

-x [number] forces fetchnews to reconsider the last "number" articles
for fetching. That is, if the last article fetched in a particular
newsgroup was 12547 and you run fetchnews with "-x 1000", it would
retrieve message ids from all articles since 11547 and look whether
they are already available.

Unfortunately, you cannot set the value differently for each group.
This means that in a high-traffic group with 200 articles a day, you
will reconsider the last five days on average, whereas in a low-traffic
group with 5 articles a day, you will reconsider the last 200 days.
Therefore you should use this feature only together with "maxage".

> > Fetchnews using NEWNEWS would be the proper solution.

NEWNEWS is only supported by a minority of servers. Of course, it
might be sensible to either give fetchnews an option "have_newnews"
or check every server with NEWNEWS and only use the traditional
method of fetching when this fails.

No code exists which implements either of these features.

--Cornelius.

-- 
/* Cornelius Krasel, U Wuerzburg, Dept. of Pharmacology, Versbacher Str. 9 */
/* D-97078 Wuerzburg, Germany   email: krasel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx */
/* "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are."  */

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