----- Original Message -----
From: "Beartooth" <bearto...@comcast.net>
To: <pan-users@nongnu.org>
Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 09:52 AM
Subject: [Pan-users] Re: Newsfeed
> On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:23:16 +0000, Duncan wrote:
>
>> Beartooth <bearto...@comcast.net> posted
>> pan.2009.03.22.18.12...@comcast.net,
>> excerpted below, on Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:12:34 +0000:
> [...]
>> Sounds like you no longer have authorization to use that server -- or at
>> least the swva server is of that opinion...
>
> Their service had been dropping off, I don't know why, for weeks
> before they announced they were getting out of the business. On advice, I
> tried asking them whether they were selling or trashing the equipment --
> hoping, in the former case, to be able to go with a successor. No dice;
> as it happens, I can't get to that gadget, to return it -- and they don't
> care.
> [...]
>> The no headers thing... I'm not sure. It could mean the groups aren't
>> active (the server doesn't get an active feed for them) on the servers
>> you still have.
>
> Bburg.general, for just one town, has been fairly inactive lately
> -- but not completely. Other groups, like va.general and va.forsale, are
> rarely inactive longer than a day or three.
>
>> There is, however, at least one pan bug that occasionally causes it not
>> to see messages on a group. This bug has to do with messages cross-
>> posted to groups you've been following for awhile, but other than that
>> I've not been able to nail it down at all. But pan won't fetch messages
>> for the group when it hits that bug. If you start a new pan instance or
>> wipe the data on the old one, so pan forgets about the cross-posted
>> messages on the groups you've already been following, you can then
>> download messages for the new group without a problem, so it's obviously
>> a pan-side data bug, not a bug with the server or whatever.
>
> By wipe do you mean, for instance, moving all of .pan2 to some
> temporary location?? Or just the Groups folder in it? Or ...?
>
>> I have a couple groups I'd like to follow but don't, because of this
>> bug. It's very frustrating! I wish I could say for sure whether you
>> are seeing the same bug or whether it's something simple, but I don't
>> know enough about the bug /or/ your setup to say --- UNLESS you can say
>> with relative certainty that there were no cross-posts between the
>> groups that don't seem to be getting messages and others you follow.
>
> Are you talking recent cross-posts by me? All by me? All period
> -- i.e., any ever by anyone? Ad does "others" mean all of mine?
> Rec.food.cooking, for instance, is subject to all the spam, cross-posts,
> and other ills known to usenet. The grc groups are almost completely free
> of such things.
>
>> In any case, one thing you CAN try (other than deleting your entire set
>> of pan data and starting over), is going into the group in question and
>> telling it to get ALL headers, not just new ones.
>
> With news.swva.net gone, bburg.general and bburg.forsale have
> disappeared from my list of subscriptions; and a search for bburg gets no
> hits at all.
>
> Va.general and va.forsale are still on the list, and "get all
> headers" got nothing.
>
>> Then ensure you have
>> view read messages toggled on, and maybe the new messages will show up
>> as already read.
>
> Where is that toggle? I don't find it.
>
> Btw, I often delete what look to be uninteresting threads; in a
> couple of quiet groups, I've been known to delete everything. I don't
> recall whether any of these geographic groups are among them. Would that
> matter?
>
> I tried unsubbing va.forsale and then resubbing it, telling Pan
> at several points to get all headers. I never got any.
>
>> If your problem is the above bug, this won't help.
>> But it's also possible it's just a server mixup, in which case it might.
>> If you are actually getting messages that way but pan thinks they're
>> all read, there's a fix for that. I'll not try to explain it here, but
>> if that's what you're seeing, ask and I will in a new reply.
>
> I wasn't seeing a list of headers all marked read. I wasn't
> seeing any headers at all. Just a blank white header pane and a blank
> white body pane.
>
>>> I'm thinking I need yet another server besides motzarella; got
>>> any good ones??
>>
>> Perhaps the "gold standard" is giganews, if you decide to go paid. They
>> aren't what one would call "cheap", but they put a lot of effort and
>> money into ensuring that their news service is the best connected
>> possible, and if giganews doesn't have the post, it's relatively safe to
>> say few servers beyond the one the original poster used to post the
>> message, got it. Giganews /does/ have some cheaper text-only accounts,
>> tho, I believe. That sounds like what you may be interested in.
>
> Verizon used to subcontract to Giganews for its feed(s), and I
> seem to recall once having some other provider that did, too. And
> news.verizon.com used to have not only the bburg and va hierarchies, but
> even the vatech one. And if memory serves, there were no limits.
>
>>> Iow, if I have to use one I pay for, set that to a lower
>>> priority, right? Do all feeds charge the same way -- i.e., by
>>> bandwidth, or by flat rate? Or is it a howling chaos out there?
>>
>> "Howling chaos" is a pretty apt description. I don't believe it's quite
>> as bad as shopping for a cell phone service, but it's not far from it,
>> either. There's all sorts of plans and prices based on all sorts of
>> criteria for all sorts of purposes and usage patterns out there.
>>
>> The saving grace for you is that you've said you aren't particularly
>> interested in binaries. That means MUCH lower traffic, and
>> consequently, that you can knock off the expensive options right off the
>> bat.
>
> Is there any easy way to get a handle on my traffic? If I can get
> back to all the groups I want to follow, there'll be fifty or sixty of
> them, ranging between ones I check at least once a day, and ones I don't
> check even once a month. There'll also be some where I read almost
> everything, and some where I delete 90% and up without reading.
>
> Giganews's bottom ("jade") offer is 3 GB/mo, for $2.99 (which, I
> *think*, is also per month).
>
>> Text-only also means that you're likely to be able to find a free server
>> that will work well for you if you try hard enough. Many folks like
>> motzarella, which comes well recommended as a free server tho I've never
>> tried it.
>
> You seem to be telling me it is possible only to search provider
> by provider for groups; not to search for a group and find out which
> providers carry it. Right?
>
>> But, if you just want something that works and don't mind paying a bit,
>> for text-only, there's lots of paying options out there too. You can
>> get anything from block accounts, say 25 GB for $15 or $25 or some such,
>> which don't expire and should last a very long time (very likely over
>> two years for 25 GB on text-only), to the few dollars a month services
>> like giganews and others offer. As I mentioned, giganews has a
>> reputation as the gold-standard and for text you can likely get by with
>> their cheapest account, if you don't mind paying a bit to just get the
>> best and forget about it. Personally, I've never had a paid account
>> with them, but that's because I do binaries too on occasion (tho rarely
>> these days), and for binaries, while they are the gold standard, there's
>> cheaper and almost as good, which is where I've gone.
>
> Are you saying you pay a flat fee, once, for a set number of GB,
> and not again till you've used that up? All the plans at giganews.com
> that I see today seem to charge per month. They also have a 10-day trial
> period that's download-only -- you can't post. (I suppose you could
> arrange to skip that, though they don't say how.)
>
>>>> Since all the gmane groups, for instance, will only be on the gmane
>>>> server, it'll only grab them from there. Same, I expect, with the grc
>>>> groups, etc, from the grc server only.
>>>
>>> That's fer sartin shore. Steve Gibson is as close to the world
>>> champion of computer defenses as any one person I know of.
>>
>> This gets OT, but while I do respect his knowledge, he does have enough
>> of the salesman in him to be quite offensive to some. I do still
>> recommend him for MS users, but with the caveat that they take the self-
>> sales-pitch he offers with a rather large grain of salt. If people can
>> do that, he's a good source of security information. If they're
>> offended by the sales pitch or gullible enough to be taken in by it, for
>> them, there are probably better (less offensive and/or more neutral)
>> sources for the same info. But he has a VERY good way of being able to
>> break it down into the basics for the people that might not otherwise
>> get or understand the vital security info he teaches -- as long as you
>> aren't too offended or taken in by the self-sales-pitch at the same
>> time.
>
> Well, I yield to no man (nor woman either) in puncto detestation
> of the Gates of Hell and all his works. I boot to an XP drive, or boot an
> XP laptop, maybe once every month or two, to get my GPSs to talk to my
> legacy software (and hope soon to stop even that); so I run ZoneAlarm, an
> anti-virus, and an anti-spyware, and call that good enough. Otoh, there
> are a lot of other good people on Gibson's groups, besides Gibson himself
> -- those are the best places I know to go when I do have M$-related
> questions, as for instance trying to get Wine to run Garmin.
>
>>>> That's why I've repeated it several different ways now. =:^)
>>>
>>> Duncan, I can always count on you. I wish you were on more of the
>>> groups I follow.
bburg.4sale
bburg.announce
bburg.auto.repairs
bburg.bev.announce
bburg.bev.general
bburg.business
bburg.forsale
bburg.general
The groups above are carried on Giganews.
--
Travis in Shoreline Washington
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