Pissed off the postman?

Posts don't stay on a server forever. A busy newsgroup on a small server will expire articles after only a day or two. On other servers, they might hang around as much as a month. So some people are still seeing all your messages, others aren't.

Gary

Several possibilities -- none of which would include an irate news administrator (and such could at best only remove your articles from one or two of the thousands of news servers around the world.)

1) our newsreader normally marks whatever you read as "already read" so it is not presented to you a second and third time. If it did not behave this way, you could have a ton of messages which you had already read cluttering up the selection process every time you go into a newsgroup. 2) Each news server has its own expire time setting -- often on a newsgroup-by-newsgroup basis -- to weed out old articles, so the disk space requirements does not become astronomical. Exceptions are sites like google, which make a point of archiving the whole of usenet all the way back to at least the time when Deja-News started, which was the predecessor to Google.

I run my own news server, and have the expire time set to 30 days for rec.crafts.metalworking and a few other specially selected newsgroups. For most others, the default expire time is two or three days. And I only carry a relatively small subset of the news stream -- I don't have the bandwidth to carry more. :-)

3) Your news server may have crashed, and been restored from a backup made after your articles were posted. (This is assuming that any backups were even made on what is after all a rather transient set of files -- thanks to the continuing flood of new articles, and the constant expiration of old ones. 4) Remotely possible, but more likely in certain specific newsgroups is someone running a cancelbot to make the newsgroup unusable. It is is far more likely to be done to newsgroups like news.admin.net-abuse.email by one of the spammers whose accounts have been terminated as a result of actions there. 5) Of course -- if what you posted could be construed as spam, or abuse in some form, or even binary attachments -- *those* are grounds for the news admin of your news server to send out cancel messages -- which will only work on a given percentage of news servers, because they have been abused in the past.

Just for the fun of it, I just ran a script to look at the articles which were posted under your name, and to extract the "Message-ID: " (which is unique on each article), and the date. (Article numbers for the same article differ on each news server, but "Message-ID: "s are guaranteed to be unique. Here is what my script found:

====================================================================== } Message-ID: } Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 17:43:26 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 00:04:45 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 19:15:16 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 19:55:34 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2003 06:39:27 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 06:16:52 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 21:39:02 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 13:29:28 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 15:10:42 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 19:23:04 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 21:37:53 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 16:52:40 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 17:15:18 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 19:38:52 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 09:17:53 -0600 } Message-ID: } Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 21:04:41 -0600 ======================================================================

So -- how far back were the ones in question posted?

If you really want to check on them, go to Google and run a search on what they have. They may not have the most recent squeezed into the archive yet, but everything else should be there.

Good Luck, DoN.