What the !

Same thing happened here this morning. A whole bunch of posts showed up again all with the same time stamp

Same here. I haven't seen this for years, but it used to happen every once in a while, maybe eight or ten years ago.

USENET obviously burped. I just picked up about 30 retreads.

Terry Coombs presented the following explanation :

Lots of people are getting them. Most likely everyone is getting them.

Agent, Thunderbird, MES News etc so not related to your news reader :-?

A misconfigured server, out there somewhere.

news groups are feed by two main server farms. One East and One West coasts of the US. There might be a move afoot to cut back to a single server farm......

Another thing, there is a file on your disk and mine that is composed of the index numbers of each news groups. Dates don't matter. The file index number it has determines if it is 'new' or old. When you disable a usnet group, your record is purged. Folder is purged. When you say rats, wrong one - and start it back up - you haven't read all of them... e.g. want to read old ones - and a server has them in archive ? that is the way - but have your reader allow to read 60,000 or so not the last 200. Then you will see T-Nut and the rest in real time. Update and 'read' all of those and you won't see them again.

That is how it works - so if a server you use gets messages that have different numbers than your file is control on - you get old or fewer new.

You can also hack your own file - I used to do that and do the same.

Martin

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

% Xnews scoring rule to hide "SpaceSST BBS Usenet Fidonet Gateway" spew Score:: -9999 From: .*@.*\.remove\-cdt\-.*

OK Larry, just how did you break usenet this time?

No, Larry broke it!

Who, li'l old ME? I waved my special wand and...

Why though is this the only group that has exhibited this ? I read like 10 other groups , not a single one has burped ... just here . Almost makes ya wonder if there is some nefarious scheme ... if you're paranoid . I'm not - very .

Every time you wave your magic wand people report you for indecent exposure.

But only after they stop laughing and pointing. :)

Perhaps a news server which was restored from backups after a serious crash. This loads the news spool with a bunch of stale news, which just gets shipped out as though it is new -- and the receiving systems check whether there is something already present in the receiving news spool with the same "Message-ID: ". If not, it is treated as new. And if the backup is old enough, none of the "Message-IDs: " will still be present, so they are accepted as new.

Back in the old days, when some of the BBS systems were being attached to usenet, they would echo all the messages back to usenet re-marked as though they originated at the BBS.

Enjoy, DoN.

Luckily, the servers Earthlink contracts with have a 13 year retention. That eliminates a lot of that kind of trash. :)

It ain't, I got lots of dupes in a.o.l.u. so I agree with a "restore from backup"

I just killed the thread and got to the new posts.

technomaNge

That's the long and the short of it, yeah.

Actually just the short ...

A couple of guys are out drinking beer one night and have to pee. They walk over to the river outside the tavern and start taking leaks. One guys says "Whoo, the water sure is cold tonight." To which the other replies "Yeah, deep, too."