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Skriven 2007-10-01 03:11:10 av FidoNews Robot (2:2/2.0)
Ärende: FidoNews 24:40 [03/07]: General Articles
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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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                          Articles MIA?
                         By Ward Dossche
                           2:292/875

Recently there has been a flurry about the alleged refusal by the
current Fidonews-editor to publish certain articles.

Personally I do not believe the first letter of such accusations but
then Z1 is not filled with demons and I do have the music album
"50.000.000 Elvis fans can't be wrong".

So is there any truth then perhaps to the claim that articles do not
make it, for whatever reason that is?

Personally I find it pretty childish of individuals claiming to have
sent-in an article, not seeing it getting published and then, instead
of trying to figure-out what went wrong, start moaning in private to
another ZC.

In any case, I wondered which part of the alleged problem could be due
to me.

.. and I found an issue.

The D'Bridge mailer uses its own base-36 format naming-convention for
outbound archive files. For example when I have mail for 1:140/1 Bob
Seaborn, then internally it will look like "N-00103W.001".

The utility-programme DBUTIL will then move this file to the
appropriate directory and rename it 008C0001.xxx. So far, so good.

The problem arose however in the case of unarchived netmail. DBUTIL
would then use the filename 00000000.PKT ... and always the same name.

So a test was set-up to see what would occur if new netmail would
present itself for being MOVEd. Would nothing happen, would the
existing file be appended or would it simply be overwritten.

As it turned-out, the existing file was overwritten. As a result the
information contained in it was lost.

In the meantime the author has been informed about the bug and a fix
was ready within hours so the event will not repeat itself.

However, is this something which could have happened to mail
containing articles for Fidonews?

Theoretically "yes"!

Has it happened?

I cannot tell.
Usually when mail becomes available for Bj-rn it gets delivered within
a minute or two or three.

Netmail to the editor at 2:2/2 will normally be routed to 2:2/0 unless
people have a dedicated routing set for this particular entry.

So the possibility cannot be discounted however that the connection
hiccuped for a few minutes and that in this timeframe a new netmail
landed thereby overwriting what was in the queue.

It would explain in any case why a single netmail might have
dissappeared in a black hole.

On purpose I write "a single netmail" and not "all the netmail" as I
do not accept that this phenomenum could explain the alleged
dissappearance of 10 or more articles.

After all, I do not think netmail is the preferred method of delivery
with all the other options around. To learn more about that, the
publication guidelines are somewhere inside this issue of Fidonews.

- Ward -


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