Still having Trouble with VM and this NG

Like you I use news.virginmedia.com but unlike you I have not had and am not having any problems. Retires under desk and waits for lightning strike.............

Regards Colin Docherty

Bob M> At the risk of being boring, I still have no new posts visible to me in

I have changed my defaults and am posting this with Virginmedia as a test.

Richard

Ok immediate response. Not sure what your problem may be. What reader are you using if not using Google?

Richard

Hi Richard, I am using Sea-Monkey (successor to Netscape) and all my other regular newsgroups are working ok through this news reader. I know I could change my reader but I just don't understand by one particular NG is not working for me and for example Colin D above is OK using the same server.

Regards

Bob

When I was using Netscape, it would occasionally hiccup and lose track of how many messages had been received for a group. As a result, it would think that the number of the last message in the group was much higher than it actually was. So when the server said, for example, that new messages 123444-123555 were available, Netscape would ignore them because it thought the last message it had gotten was 222222.

I would fix this by going into the .rc file that Netscape used to keep track of messages received and changing the last message number for the affected group to something much lower.

Unsubscribing and resubscribing to the group might or might not work. It depends on whether your newsreader completely deletes all information about the group when you unsubcribe (in which case the problem will be fixed) or just marks the group as not active but retains the old info (and consequently, when you resubscribe, it'll mark the group as active and the old *bad* info will still be in effect).

Unfortunately, since I don't use Netscape anymore, I can't tell you just where to find the .rc file to be changed. Given your server, it'll probably be named news.virginmedia.com.rc and be in a folder something like C:\Documents and Settings\...\Application Data\Netscape\Profiles\...\News

If you find it and the group's line is more than just something like "uk.rec.models.engineering: 1-123456" but has a long string of numbers, just change the numbers to something like 1-2.

HTH, Tove

Could I suggest that you try the rather better VM text-only news server. It is run in-house by VM rather than the outsourced (and occasionally buggy) news.vm.com.

news-text.blueyonder.co.uk (or, I think, text.news.blueyonder.co.uk also works) unless of course you require the binary groups...

Quick elimination check by using OE must be worth doing?

Hi Tove,

This idea sounds like it could be the answer once I've located the file. I searched the whole machine for *.rc and found a couple related to News on NTLworld but edited them made no difference. However I had the bright idea of using a different machine which also has sea monkey installed and pointed at news.virginmedia.com This will download all the URME posts without a problem. So clearly my everyday computer has something wrong with its set up. At the moment I have too much invested in my book mark files and set up which is not backed up. I'll sort this first and then do a clean install of Seamonkey and see if things are better.

Thanks for the steer Tove.

Best Regards

Bob

Thanks Geo, Switching to BY server seems to have worked as well as using another machine and sticking with VM - see my reply to Tove

I'll keep plugging away at this to try and understand what is wrong with my set up on my everyday PC and VM

But at least I can see my fav NG without resorting to Google Groups.

Thanks to everyone who has suggested solutions and apologies to those who have tolerated me going on about it.

Back to Engineering!!!

Bob