Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Duplicate articles from B news site - would C news help ??
Message-ID: <1990Nov27.172848.25176@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <ianh.659156546@morgana> <1990Nov22.175142.18296@zoo.toronto.edu> <andy.659499523@xwkg>
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 90 17:28:48 GMT

In article <andy.659499523@xwkg> andy@xwkg.Icom.Com (Andrew H. Marrinson) writes:
>>... at least one incident recently of a combination of software oddities
>>causing repeated posting of articles which *looked* similar but were really
>>different articles, with different message-IDs...
>
>Can you tell us a little more about this weird combination?

It was a combination of an obsolete version of C News that, in certain
circumstances, fouled up headers slightly, and an overly-helpful B News
that inserts a message-ID header if there isn't one.  So each B News site
that got the original article turned it into a "new" article.  (Sites
running modern C News discarded the original as illegal, but there were
enough B News sites that got it to produce considerable proliferation.)

>We are a
>leaf site getting our feed only from uunet, and almost have the
>articles arriving here recently have been rejected as duplicates...

If articles are being rejected as duplicates, then they really *are*
duplicates, and the "weird combination" business is entirely irrelevant.

>... running C news (with libdbm, not dbz -- is that a problem?).  I
>investigated this further today trying to figure out if it was my
>problem or someone else's (uunet?).

Barring the unlikely possibility that your C News is rejecting things
that it shouldn't be, the problem is at your feed site.  Uunet is in
the middle of some hardware transitions, I believe, and things may be
a bit confused.

Running dbm instead of dbz is slow, but should not break anything.
-- 
"I'm not sure it's possible            | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
to explain how X works."               |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
