On 14/02/2023 20:59, William F Pokorny wrote:
> To chime in with a related topic; Many of us were using Thunderbird's search
facilities of the newsgroups over the formally less reliable web based search / google
search.
> 
> As, I think, you are aware, after the recovery from the crash the news server is
maintaining much less of the overall posting history. It's often impossible to get to
any older posts these days via Thunderbird.
> 
> I remember you saying the POV-Ray news server had been somewhat mangled in the past
to keep posts in most, but not all forums, for a very long time. Something much longer
the usual 12 months or so. My 'guess' is that when the news server was restored most,
if not all, news server forums are now dropping posts after a much shorter time (12
months?).
> 
> Whether this worth fixing or not I'm unsure. Expect these days the newsgroup
interface not the primary one for most users. Having a reliable way to search the
forums should be primary the goal.

I don't think the articles are being deleted. I do suspect that it's difficult or
impossible to get the NNTP server to give a reliable view of what messages are
available.

I'm not sure if it's because I kept my old Thunderbird NNTP cache across the crash or
whether I was lucky and it did download all the headers from the new server before it
started playing up. As it is, though, thunderbird shows me messages in
povray.binaries.images going back to 2005. In povray.bugreports it shows messages
going back to 1998, though if I try to load them it says there's no such article. The
retained articles (where I was able to get it to load from the server) in this group
seem to start around September 2009.

In PBI I have messages going back to 2005 and they all seem to load when I do spot
checks.

To test that an article really is on the server and not just locally cached you can
easily check using telnet as long as you know the article ID. Example:
  
> # telnet news.povray.org 119
> Trying 203.29.75.35...
> Connected to news.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 200 news.povray.org DNEWS Version  5.7b1,, S0, posting OK

Ask for for an old post where I know the article ID:

> article <429e54b3$1@news.povray.org>
> 220 58213 <429e54b3$1@news.povray.org> article retrieved - head and body follows
> From: "trulayne" <tru### [at] newrrcom>
> Newsgroups: povray.general
> Subject: Equally spaced objects along a spline curve
> Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 19:37:06 -0500
[SNIP]
> TIA
> Dennis
> .

Select PBI as the current group:

> group povray.binaries.images
> 211 74934 66649 146750 povray.binaries.images selected

This tells us the oldest message is article number 66649 and the newest is 146750
(this is the message I'm replying to).

Check what 66649 was:

> head 66649
> 221 66649 <3d6bd206$1@news.povray.org> article retrieved - head follows
> From: "Zeger Knaepen" <zeg### [at] studentkuleuvenacbe>
> Newsgroups: povray.binaries.images
> References: <3d6b4d0b@news.povray.org> <3d6baacc@news.povray.org>
<3d6bb72e@news.povray.org> <3d6bbf6a$1@news.povray.org>
> Subject: Re: Odd blur effect: squared spheres
> Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 21:24:35 +0200
[SNIP]
> Xref: news.povray.org povray.binaries.images:66649
> .

Now check the last message, 146750

> head 146750
> 221 146750 <63eb5b90$1@news.povray.org> article retrieved - head follows
> Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2023 04:59:44 -0500
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101
>  Thunderbird/102.7.1
> Subject: Re: Denoising POV-Ray images in Blender
> Newsgroups: povray.binaries.images
> References: <63dd0bd3$1@news.povray.org>
>  <web.63dd555f13ac33281f9dae3025979125@news.povray.org>
>  <63eb3670@news.povray.org>
> Content-Language: en-US
> From: William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg>
> In-Reply-To: <63eb3670@news.povray.org>
[SNIP]
> Xref: news.povray.org povray.binaries.images:146750
> .
> quit
> 205 closing connection - goodbye!
> Connection closed by foreign host.

AFAICT all the messages are still in the news server but perhaps it's not presenting
that to thunderbird in a way that it understands, at least in some cases?

Even if they were being deleted, they aren't lost forever as I have a backup with all
the posts prior to the crash and also each message is stored in the SQL db used for
the web view. Being able to *find* them is another issue, as google aren't being all
to helpful.

-- Chris

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