David Chmelik posted on Sat, 11 Oct 2025 02:29:04 -0000 (UTC) as excerpted:
> Nevertheless, I tried GigaNews. They've been very helpful, though when > I started using their server, a large number of posts' dates are wrong > at beginning and end of some/most newsgroups. The beginning has > question marks, and some before Usenet, and a few--not enough--after it > started, and most since only 2003... then it has some from '2026' to > almost the year 10000. What's most concerning is 1979 to 2003 gap. That's... interesting. Fair warning: This goes rather train-of-thought as I try to come up with plausibilities... =:^) First thing I'd try is a look at the full headers, and if you don't see it there, the raw message, either dug directly out of cache (should be cached by Message-ID as file-name, .msg extension IIRC), or saved-as-text and then opened in a text editor. Tho I'm not absolutely sure that pan does save-as-text as a direct cache copy, vs. saving it from the possibly processed state in RAM, so I'd not rely too much on save-as-text particularly for any "funny" behavior like this that you're trying to debug. (Written as I'm about to send, after thinking about all the possibilities in this post... Now I'm curious!) I'd be interested in seeing one of these raw messages, actually. Maybe you could post it as a file attachment? If the date headers in the raw message are still clearly insane, then you gotta decide whether the problem is likely to be a troll doing it deliberately (or maybe just someone with a horribly screwed up posting client!), or if it's likely to be a giganews issue, or possibly a pan issue. You could try another client. IIRC even lynx (the text-based browser) has news/nntp handling, and could possibly be used to fetch the message for comparison. Or try some other more conventional news client. If a second client comes up with similar screwy dates for the same message-id, then it's almost certainly stored that way on giganews. Maybe first check their FAQ (if any) to see if it mentions screwy dates. If not, at that point... it's giganews, maybe actually test their support claims to see if it's worth the money. Presumably they'll need the message-id at least, and the author, newsgroup, xref if possible, and claimed date, may help. Or just send them the raw message (including all that stuff and more) as you dug it up and see what their support says they get by comparison at their end. A couple things I do seem to recall, however. I believe the message format may have been different say back in the 80s, before full standardization. It's possible something screwed up that conversion or whatever. Also, there are of course even still gateways (like the gmane list2news gateway) and private servers (like the microsoft servers and groups that at least back in the 90s weren't officially propagated, but were mostly on the public servers too... in perhaps not complete form but there). And I forget what it was called but there was another set of "groups" that were actually converted/gatewayed as well, from IIRC a bulletin-board format... Given that completeness is a giganews selling point, it's quite possible they have perhaps not entirely accurately converted some of these old formats from archives, and maybe that's got something to do with the wonky dates. Another possibility is epoc dates, Unix (Jan 1, 1970, is day zero, and "negative" numbers would get pretty huge if interpreted as unsigned... also see y2k and 32-bit-y2038 messes) vs. something else. That shouldn't appear in /nntp/ date headers, but if they're using a date-stamped received date that could be in unix time... or they could be converting from some non-standard or pre-nntp-standard format... and/or pulling from unreliable archives... Maybe some messages don't have their date header at all and the server /is/ using a received date... possibly as pulled out of a wonky archive or conversion... Of course the nntp/internet-message RFCs standardize a date header, including order, but localized date formats vary across the world and if some clients screwed it up or the message is converted/gatewayed/from- wonky-archive... In terms of missing posts, there are people who set x-no-archive or similar headers, and IIRC there's also an old header that defined propagation limits (with "world" or some such the default and widest propagation), but it could easily be two decades since I looked at that stuff, so the details are long out of memory. But any of those would be posts here or there, not gaps of multiple years without any posts at all! -- 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 [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
