Re: [Pan-users] articles don't stay marked read

[Duncan]

David Chmelik posted on Mon, 16 Oct 2023 18:52:26 -0700 as excerpted:

>> A way to check for this (also a symptom if you switch servers while
>> using the same account and thus the same newsrc, or if the server
>> resets its sequence numbers making it effectively a different server at
>> the same address, as can happen with new hardware if the admins aren't
>> careful to avoid the problem) is to examine the xref header sequence
>> numbers, comparing them to the numbers in your newsrc for that group. 
>> Accounting for posting volume of the group, if they're way off, that
>> could explain things.  (Tho do note that a stale newsrc, say that pan
>> is failing to update, a possibility discussed earlier, would have old,
>> lower numbers, as well.)
> I just use Eternal September (ES) and Gmane, and never saw this problem
> with them, but don't know which account you mean.  I'm looking for some
> other public servers now that AIOE closed (which had some more
> newsgroups ES doesn't).

OK.  New servers.  That could be it.

What I meant was if you switch servers, always (well, almost always, see 
the resellers caveat below) create a new server entry for a new server 
instead of just switching the address of the existing server to the new 
one.

Just switching the address on an existing server  will reuse the old newsrc 
file, which will have recorded as read totally different article sequence 
numbers (unless you're extremely lucky or the two servers had some 
arrangement that syncs article numbers -- say one being a reseller of the 
other or both being resellers of the same third party, for instance).  As I 
was explaining, depending on how the old numbers intersect with the new 
ones, the symptom can be either old messages showing up as unread (pan 
hasn't seen the new numbers), or more confusing, no messages appearing 
since pan has already seen those message numbers for that server.

Creating an all new server entry in pan will force it to start clean, 
avoiding the problem, tho you'll have to mark the groups read _once_ after 
adding the new server to catch it up with the existing servers.

... Which could be a pain if you're shopping around and thus switching 
servers quite a bit, but...

Or manually delete the newsrc (maybe have a backup of it first in case you 
want to refer to it for some reason) to start clean that way.

(In theory you can manually edit the newsrc file too, but that's really 
only worth the trouble if there's only a handful of groups affected, not 
the ~1500 you mentioned.  Far easier to just start clean.)

-- 
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