I am not enough of a network guy to understand how Usenet operates. My news reader shows me a count of how many new messages are supposed to be posted. Yet I never see that many. Sometimes what I see is well under half of the messages my news reader sees. What (and where) are the missing messages?
on 4/11/2009 10:38 AM (ET) Don Stauffer wrote the following:
Do you have filters set to delete certain posts or users? Those filtered posts are not really deleted, just not downloaded from the server. The new message count is how many messages are on the server, but you are only going to download those that are not blocked by your filters.
I have the same problem that Don has, without any filters set on many of the newsgroups where the problem occurs. It seems really odd to see that 15-20 new messages are indicated in a newsgroup only to have 2-5 messages show up when the newsgroup is opened.
I'm seeing the same thing. I think it has to do with the way the message count gets calculated. I don't think we're actually losing any messages.
Cheers, Dave Ambrose
The message count you see is just an estimate. On your last visit, the last (newest) message was #10450, and now the last message is #10450, so the newsreader assumes there are 50 new messages. (On your first visit to a group, it uses the first & last message numbers to calculate the count.)
But the server may delete messages for various reasons: cancel requests, spam filters, attachments in a non-binary newsgroup, etc. When messages are deleted, their message numbers aren't reused, so that leaves 'holes'; there are only 47 new messages instead of 50.
Some news readers have an "accurate message counts" option, which works by fetching a list of messages from the server and counting them. But fetching a list of messages takes longer than asking for the first & last message numbers, so this option is usually turned off by default.
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