MVP: Pls help

[joeu2004]

Please forgive this off-topic inquiry. I appreciate your indulgence
and your patience.

Can some tell me what MS Community Newsgroup or public
newsgroup (e.g. microsoft.public.*), if any, that I can post to
in order to get help or a knowledgable explanation about
missing articles that I posted to MS CN, or to confirm a
potential problem with MS CN?

I sent email to Customer Service. Either they are clueless,
or they treat everyone with a question as if they are novices.
I am far from that. In any case, Customer Service has been
no help so far.

I have searched the list of MS CNs and public newsgroups,
but I did not find one that seemed on-topic.

Alternatively, perhaps someone can offer some insight into
the problem.

I posted two responses using MS CN. Even as long as,
now, 29 hours later, the responses do not appear in MS
CN. However, the articles are visible in the corresponding
public newsgroup using Google Groups.

(The second posted response was an abridged version of
the first response -- an attempt to repost while at the same
time "correcting" a presumed problem with the original article.)

My question is: why aren't the articles visible using MS CN?

It is not a question of delay, first because other articles that
I posted later do appear in a timely manner in that MS CN,
and second because the "delay" has really been too long.

I suspect that the articles might have been too long. Does
MS CN have a limit on article size, be it lines or characters?

Alternatively, perhaps there is a problem with the article
records on the MS CN news server(s) -- that is, something
is out of sync. But honestly, I am not familiar enough with
NNTP and how news servers are implemented to speculate
further.

I could try reposting "the" article again, but breaking it into
two responses in the hopes of (a) bypassing any size limit,
and (b) "resyncing" with the news server. But having done
that once already (but not __drastically__ reducing the size),
I am relunctant to take another "shot in the dark" without
some knowledgable insight into the root cause of the problem
might be.

TIA.

 

[Cindy Winegarden]

Hi Joe,

I'm not sure I can help but what's MS "CN" and what are the titles of your
posts? People using Outlook Express sometimes need to reset their newsgroups
and re-download everything to see posts they're looking for.

With the title of the post maybe somebody else can verify that they can or
can't see your posts, which would help in finding out if the problem is
limited to you or happens to everyone.

 

[joeu2004]

I'm not sure I can help

I would appreciate any effort -- at least a pointer to the
correct newsgroup in which to discuss this problem.

what's MS "CN"

Microsoft Community Newsgroups at
http://support.microsoft.com/newsgroups.

what are the titles of your posts?

I posted two similar responses to the same thread.
The first and longer response was:

References: <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: XNPV vs. NPV(quarterly) different results
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 20:09:02 -0800
Lines: 184
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions

The second response was the same thread, except
without quoting the original posting to which I was
replying, based on a theory that the length of either
the total message or the quoted text or the structure
of the quote text (which includes tab characters)
triggered some blocking rule. I believe the second
response is about 120 lines.

I also posted a third highly-abbreviated response to
the same thread. That posting __is__ visible using
MS Community Newsgroups as well as Google Groups.

People using Outlook Express sometimes need to
reset their newsgroups and re-download everything
to see posts they're looking for.

I do not believe this is a trivial usage problem. I am
a very experienced user of the newsgroups. As noted
above, some of my postings succeed even, whereas
others have not for the same thread.

I use IE, not OE. Moreover, I am no stranger to these
newsgroups. If you do a search for "joeu2004", you
should discover a great many postings of mine, mostly
helpful(?) responses.

I post using either Google Groups or MS Community
Newsgroups. Both are web interfaces. I have used
Google Groups for many years. I have used MS
Community Newsgroups for a few months. I started
using MS Community Newsgroups when I discovered
that some MSCN postings do not appear in GG.

With the title of the post maybe somebody else can
verify that they can or can't see your posts

The first two postings to that thread are not visible
using MS Community Newsgroups, but they are
visible using Google Groups. The third posting to
that thread is visible using MSCN as well as GG.

which would help in finding out if the problem is
limited to you or happens to everyone.

I serious doubt that "the problem" is limited to me.
But to be clear, "the problem" is that the posted
articles are not visible specifically using MS
Community Newsgroups. I would expect that are
visible when using some other news service,
since the articles were obvious transmitted across
the internet, as evidence by their visibility using
Google Groups.

My suspicion is that MS Community Newsgroup has
some import rules that block "large" articles, or that
the MSCN news server got out of sync with that
thread, perhaps due to an intermittent internal error
when it might have first archived the articles, which
were posted using MSCN. Typically I believe that
news server will not import articles from the network
if the articles were posted on one of their own news
servers.

But I hasten to reiterate that while I am an extremely
experienced newsgroup user and frequent contributor,
I know almost nothing about NNTP, the news service
protocol, and how the news service works in general.

 

[Cindy Winegarden]

Hi Joe,

Other people call those newsgroups "the web interface to the Microsoft
public newsgroups," which is why I was confused.

In Outlook Express I am able to read your 3 posts. Via the web interface I
can see only one of them.

I posted a message to one of the test groups that was 3 times as long as
your longest message and the whole text showed up.

I'll forward your issue to my contacts at Microsoft.

 

[joeu2004]

I'll forward your issue to my contacts at Microsoft.

I really do appreciate that. I have gotten nowhere via
the microsoft.com Contact Us web form.

Thanks for confirming that there is no arbitrary length
limitation.

 

[Pete_UK]

Joe,

I have experienced similar problems to you recently in that some (but
not all) my postings are taking a very long time before they appear - I
use IE and access through Google Groups. Dave Peterson responded to my
posts ("Advice on timing of posts appearing" and "Link to a changing
cell? You'll see ...") by suggesting that Google is having problems at
the moment. I find it very frustrating, but I have not yet had any
postings which get lost, as you seem to have suffered with MS CN.

Pete

 

[joeu2004]

This problem gets stranger and stranger by the moment.

Inspired by Cindy's efforts, I decided to try some methodical
tests of my own.

When I repost the original reply (cut-and-paste from Google
Groups), the posting initially is visible using the MSCN interface
when I look almost immediately after submission. But when I
look a minute or so later, the posting is gone(!).

Yet, when I post the same text to the "test here" newsgroup
(microsoft.public.test.here), as Cindy did, using the MSCN
interface, the posting seems to "stick". That is, it is not
removed later. With one caveat: every reply in the "test
here" newsgroup replaces the message being replied to(!).
This is true whether or not the post message has "RE:" in
the Subject line. I don't know why that happens with my
postings. Clearly that is not the case with the spam test
postings that are flooding the "test here" newsgroup today :-(.

I have a theory about the posted-then-removed articles in
the MSCN newsgroup. I know nothing about the topology
of the MSCN network. But it is not uncommon to have
several tiers of application servers for such services.

Based on that assumption, I suspect the server where the
submission is made initially archives the posting local,
perhaps only temporarily. The submission is passed to a
back-end server, which performs some sanity checks. For
unknown reasons, my posting fails the checks. So the
back-end server removes the posting from the local archive.

Just a wild guess, of course. But the model does fit what I
observed, and it is not an unreasonable implementation of a
complex news server architecture.

(By the way, I would hope the MSCN news server maintains log
files, which might help to confirm or disprove my theory.)

Thanks again, Cindy, for taking an interest in this problem.

 

[Pete_UK]

And Joe,

my posting was made on Jan 7 at 11:47pm - it just seemed to have got
lost for a day. Incidentally, it is now Jan 9 at 9:40am. Let's see
whaen this appears!

Pete

 

[Roger Govier]

Hi Pete

It appeared (timed at 9:39) at 9:59 on my system here in the UK.

 

[joeu2004]

I have experienced similar problems to you recently
in that some (but not all) my postings are taking a
very long time before they appear

That is not the problem. As I noted in my original article,
the posting had not appeared even 29 hours later. It has
now been 3.5 days, and they still are not visible.

The article does appear on remote news servers -- namely
Google Groups -- but it is not visible on the news server
from which it was submitted. That is not inexplicable, given
the complex tiered system of servers that some service
providers adopt; but I think it is unlikely, given the way that
I believe news server archives work.

Moreover, as I updated recently, I discovered that reposted
versions of that article do appear briefly immediately on
the news server where they are submitted, but they are
subsequently removed within a minute or so.

(Caveat: That might be due to the similarity of the content
of the postings. I notice that those repostings also do not
appear in Google Groups more than 12 hours later. Perhaps
some versions of news server software now attempt to
thwart spam flooding by removing what appears to be
duplicates of the same article -- text that differs by less
than X%. Just a guess.)

Finally, it is only that article (reposted several times) that
this has happened to. In the same time frame, I posted
a dozen other articles -- including a very brief response to
the same thread -- with no problem.