Koos Jan Niesink posted on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 17:30:53 +0200 as excerpted: > I downloaded the latest windows binary from Steve Davies' site > (https://sites.google.com/site/paninstall/). Installation on windows 7 > starter went fine, the same goes for the configuration. However when I > started to download headers from the newsgroups there is some unexpected > behaviour. I can e.g. download the latest 300 headers. When I close the > application or click on an other newsgroup some or all headers are lost > from the 1st newsgroup. Have anyone else noticed this issue?
FWIW I'm on Linux (couldn't do MS if I wanted to as it's proprietary and I couldn't agree to various clauses in the EULA, including the one where they waive responsibility for the code... expecting me to assume responsibility for something I'm not even allowed to see what it does before I'm supposed to agree to take the responsibility for it!), but I've not seen that sort of behavior here. However, there's a number of pan options that could appear to do that, if you're not aware of them and have them set incorrectly. First, be sure they're not simply being marked as read, with the option to hide read posts set. Check prefs, behavior tab, groups section, and ensure that pan isn't set to auto-mark-read when leaving group or getting new headers. Then in the view menu, under header pane, make sure match only unread articles isn't set, or if it is, that it's indeed what you want. FWIW, the way a lot of servers handle per-group message sequence numbers, having either of the auto-mark-read options in prefs/general/groups set, can risk missing posts. What happens is that these servers do their numbering on an incoming server, then after spam filtering and the like, pass them on to the customer-facing front-ends. But with the processing, sometimes the in theory sequential numbers get out of order, and with those options checked, pan likes to mark whole ranges as read, instead of only the specific messages that you /have/ read (or deliberately marked- read manually), thus marking some read that were originally missing on the server, but that the server will suddenly "find", later on. Keeping those options unchecked helps prevent that, so I always recommend that people uncheck them, even if they would otherwise prefer to set that option. If you do like all remaining messages set as read when you leave a group (or before fetching more headers), use the select-all-headers option, then mark-as-read. Because this only marks the selected messages read, it doesn't mark any read that the server hasn't delivered yet, so is a bit safer. It's also worth noting that you can customize pan's hotkeys and make this a faster sequence to trigger via hotkey, if you do this regularly. As for hiding/unhiding the already read messages, I definitely DO use THAT feature here, but I used the hotkey customization to set "r" to invoke that toggle, so I can toggle it between view-unread-only and view- read-and-unread-together, with a single keystroke. =:^) Additionally, it's worth noting that there's a toolbar icon for that function, that you can glance at to see what state it's in, if you need to. Meanwhile, another feature that can make this appear to happen is the relatively new "actions" feature, configured on that tab in prefs, that can be set to do various things automatically, based on score. Among the possibilities are auto-mark-read and auto-delete. Plus, if you have auto- download set in combination with the pref back on the behavior tab that auto-marks-read downloaded articles, and of course have pan set to hide already-read articles... One more, tho this one's actually for full articles, not headers-only. Pan's default cache size is only 10 MB. That's fine for many text-only users or for binary users that do direct download-and-save, but for people like me that prefer to set pan up to auto-cache (but not save), then come back after it has everything local so there's no waiting, 10 MB isn't very big! I remember when I first started with pan and this caught me out! I had setup the download and went to do something else as I had always done on my previous client (umm... OE, back in the day...), then came back expecting to have it all downloaded, or at least just be finishing up. But it looked like it had only grabbed about a tenth of what I wanted! So I tried again, and watched in horror as it started deleting the oldest few still cached articles just as fast as it downloaded the new ones! Back then, disks were much smaller tho, and pan's max cache size as settable in the GUI was only a GB. One of my first bug requests was to have that raised, to 4 GB at least. Charles (the previous main dev) raised it to 20, just to be safe. =:^) Then a few years later, he decided that setting was too complex for simple users, and removed the GUI setting for cache size entirely (tho it could still be set by directly editing the config file), so it was even HARDER for newbies to realize what was going on! But now days, new dev, and the setting is back in the GUI. And AFAIK, there's not artificial limit at all on cache size these days. If you have a multi-tibibyte disk and want to use it all for cache, I believe it's possible, tho I actually haven't done binaries in years now, so I've not actually tested it lately. (But I do have my text-only pan set to something like 5 gigs cache, with never- expire set on the servers too, so I have several years of messages saved, but it's still actually less than a gig used so the 5 gig should last me awhile....) FWIW, I also forgot that I had pan's view filters set to match only my articles at one point, and wondered why all of a sudden I was seeing no new messages! (Of course, I had hide-read on too, and I'd read all my own messages already, so I couldn't see that only mine were showing up...) I think I actually posted after a couple days, asking if the group was still working or something. Then when /that/ post showed up, new and unread... it finally began to sink in that it might be on my end... I had a rather embarrassing explanation to post after I discovered what I'd done! =:^/ But at least it wasn't the embarrassing binary posted to the wrong group mistake I've seen happen before. So it could have been /much/ worse, I guess. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
