Re: [Pan-users] Sent posts not showing up

[Duncan]

On Saturday 12 October 2002 13:10, Matt wrote:
> When I send a new post (doesn't seem to happen with follow-up posts),
> they don't show up in the relevant news group, when viewing with pan.
> They have gone, because I can see them using google groups.  Have I
> switched something somewhere that says that I don't show my own new
> posts?  Can't see why this would happen.

[Set this to both the devel and the user group.  Reply set to devel.

This could be related to the "failure to mark articles posted by me as read" 
problem, which I also have.  Also note Friday's messages by Michael.  That 
bug has been reported several times, with # 90083 appearing to be the master, 
that lists all the others.  The last entry on it is dated 10-10, when all 
current bugs were bumped to 0.13.2 target.  The other entries are duplicate 
notes, so it doesn't appear a lot of progress has been made on it.

Mike did trace that to the lack of an x-ref header, and asked what the 
significance of that header was.  Following is a bit of analysis from this 
"mere user" (a bit of programming background, but not advanced enough for 
Pan, just yet).

I am guessing that with the 0.12 or 0.13 betas, a new technique for handling 
one's own posts was tried.  The xref header, according to rfc 1036 (here: 
http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/rfcdoctype.pl?loc=RFC&letsgo=1036&type=ftp&file_format=txt
 
or try this shorter link: http://makeashorterlink.com/?F27641712 ), is a 
server-specific list of groups and group-message-numbers that allow it to 
track what sequencial number in each group a specific message has.  

IOW, the lack if the xref header on a message is a pretty strong indication 
(although the header is optional, so it's not 100% proof, but most servers 
operate that way, and pan obviously depends on that, see below), the copy you 
are seeing did NOT come from the news server.  It appears the PAN developers, 
not unreasonably, decided it didn't make a lot of sense to post the message, 
and then have you d/l it again, when a local copy was already available 
because you posted it!  (This would be particularly true for large binary 
posts on a slow dialup connection, but Pan doesn't post binary attachments 
yet, so...)  Unfortunately, that has a number of interesting effects, some of 
which we are seeing.

The effect I am most worried about is the fact that doing it this way means 
the user sees the way the local copy was posted, not the way the server 
received its copy.  If there was an error in transmission, if said error 
didn't raise a warning, it wouldn't be detected by the user, because all the 
user sees is a local copy.  This alone is reason enough not to use this 
technique from my perspective, but I am not the Pan project owner, so I'm not 
making the decision.  It's a reasonably made desision, that I just happen to 
disagree with, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a rationally made 
decision.

The other effects as far as Pan is concerned are as we see.  It appears PAN 
normally depends on the xref header to track the read state of messages, with 
the result being that messages w/o that header don't automatically get marked 
as read, as others do.  Fortunately, they can still be marked as read 
manually.  This only affects the user's own posts, in most cases, since those 
are the only ones w/o this header.  However, a server that didn't use this 
header for its own tracking would cause PAN users on that server to see this 
behavior for other posts that didn't get this header assigned elsewhere, due 
to the fact that it is an optional header.

In your case, it appears something else is wrong, with the way PAN tracks your 
own messages.  Perhaps it can't save them as it does normally to the sent 
messages folder, or for some other reason there is a local issue.  Since it 
is now displaying the local copy of sent messages, if there is something 
wrong wit the storage or retrieval of said local copy, they won't display, 
despite the fact that they did get to the server just fine.  Apparently, PAN 
is smart enough to realize that it should have your posts locally, and thus 
won't retrieve them from the server as it would normal posts.  Of course, 
when it's NOT displaying local posts, for whatever reason, this is simply 
outsmarting itself, but...

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin