[Pan-users] Re: clearing headers?

[Duncan]

walt <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:37:52
+0000:

> I left your html intact so you can see why we avoid html.

Now deleted as grandparent quote, but definitely seconded!

> Leftmost icon on the taskbar "Get Headers..." and choose the Get All
> Headers option.  That should be sufficient.

That will re-sync headers, but it won't (I believe, it has been awhile 
since I had to test it) reset the read-message indicator correctly.  
Depending on which way the numbers go, higher or lower than before, 
either everything will now show up unread (the sequence leapt forward), 
or it'll all show up read now, and significantly into the future (it 
leapt backward).

The easiest way to deal with it, then, since the sync is being lost in 
any case, is to simply create a new server when they resync, and delete 
the old one.  It may be the same server address, the same set of 
newsgroups and the same hardware, but if they reset their numbering, to 
all intents and purposes it's a new server, so it's simplest just to 
treat it as such.

Of course, exactly as you'd have to do with a new server, you then need 
to re-mark what's already read, since it's probably going to see them all 
as unread.  The easiest way to do /that/ is to note the date of the last 
read message /before/ the switchover, toggle threading off and sort by 
date, then select all the ones previous to that date and mark-read. 

Do note that due to propagation issues, it's possible you may lose a few 
messages that hadn't made it to the old server yet, even if they were 
older than the last one that did make it.  If you want to be /sure/ you 
aren't missing any messages, you thus need to leave the last few hours 
(or days if the old server didn't have good completion) of messages from 
before the transfer date marked unread, and reread them to be sure you 
saw them all.  (One hint that you've already read it would be if pan 
shows it as unread but already downloaded.  Of course, this only works 
for messages in the cache.  Since pan's default cache is only 10 MB, 
unless you've changed it, at least if you do binaries, that'll only be a 
few messages of the overlap you should be checking.  10 MB could well be 
enough with text-only messages, however.  FWIW, to adjust the cache size 
you have to edit the appropriate line in preferences.xml directly.  
Search on cache if you're interested...)

Conversely, as long as the servers are number-synced, it shouldn't matter 
which address you tell pan to use.  This is nice for beta/test servers, 
for instance, when they decide to move them online and shutdown the old 
ones, since you can change the address from beta to standard without 
having to lose track of where you were.  Similarly with multiple number-
synced normal servers.  For instance, my ISP, Cox, used to have two 
number-synced servers, east and west.  Because they were number-synced, 
if one was down one could simply switch the address to the other one, and 
pan would happily continue tracking as if nothing had happened. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman