Someone posted about this on the Usenet Plusnet.service.customer-feedback group a few days ago, and I posted some technical details about the problem, but it seems nobody from Plusnet reads that group any more.
So here are the details I have observed:
There is a problem which has been going on for at least several months, although it seems to have got markedly worse in the last two or three months. I don't know if it's particular to the European Giganews server, or a global Giganews problem? (Someone on comp.theory complained recently that his posts were not being shown on his (US based) Giganews server, but I couldn't get him to confirm the exact symptoms, so that might be a different problem.)
The problem seems to be common across all hosted newsgroups, but is not observed on other (free) Usenet servers like AIOE!
This is what seems to be happening:
1. Giganews server receives an article, and "allocates" an article ID
for each newsgroup for the article. The high-water article
number for the groups are incremented to reflect this.
2. However, the server does not "publish" the article for some
reason. What I mean is that retrieval commands based on
article id (as opposed to message-id) show the article as
being missing. The article itself is visible on the server
if retrieved by message-id, and I notice that these "secret"
articles all are missing the Xref header, which would normally
list the allocated article numbers for each newsgroup for the
article.
3. Normally at some later point (typically hours later, maybe
several hours, or even days!) the server decides for whatever reason that
it's time to "publish" the "secret" articles, meaning that now
the articles will appear in their respective news groups, and
they become retrievable via their article numbers allocated
for each newsgroup. (Also the Xref header appears
At this point if you had not used your
newsreader since before the article arrived, the newsreader
would see the new high-water mark and retrieve the new
articles for the group, including the previously "secret"
article.
4. BUT by now, depending on what client newsreader is being used,
clients may well have given up on the article and maybe they
will NEVER be picked up by the client. (That's what my
newsreader [SeaMonkey] does, in any case.)
The problem seems to have very bad, and not so bad periods, and during bad periods there could be a message fallout rate of around 40% !!!!! The service is pretty much unusable these days...
If a Plusnet technical person wants to discuss details with me I'd be happy to do so by email or telephone. E.g. I can provide lists of missing articles and their "secret" message-ids for different groups etc..
Mike.
