"Speed" and "Search" of the forum options

On Sat, 3 Jul 2010, Warren Brayshaw wrote to us saying :

>I do find the newsreader faster

>(better) on a daily basis for checking the newest postings. I have yet to

>understand how to obtain the historical posts from the newsreader feed. Some

>tips would be appreciated.

It isn't generally possible to obtain historic posts. The NNTP system

was designed in the days of 1200 Baud modems and 40MB drives. It tries

quite hard to minimize the amount of redundant data being stored, and

expects NNTP servers to purge old posts on a fairly regular basis. It's

unusual to find servers that carry anything over a month old.

The assumption was always that news reader clients would allow the user

to save any post that was of longer term interest. My client (Turnpike)

has a very clear "Keep" button on the message viewer which instructs it

not to expire its local copy of the post being viewed. But that still

relies on me fetching (and reading) these groups faster than the CadSoft

server's expire time.

There is a web site somewhere that has been plugged in to every public

NNTP feed in the world, and has been archiving it all for posterity. So

Google is often quite good at digging up old UseNet postings.

--

Rob Pearce                       http://www.bdt-home.demon.co.uk

The contents of this | Windows NT crashed.

message are purely   | I am the Blue Screen of Death.

my opinion. Don't    | No one hears your screams.

believe a word.      |

Robert Pearce schrieb:

On Sat, 3 Jul 2010, Warren Brayshaw wrote to us saying :

>>I do find the newsreader faster

>>(better) on a daily basis for checking the newest postings. I have yet to

>>understand how to obtain the historical posts from the newsreader feed. Some

>>tips would be appreciated.

 

It isn't generally possible to obtain historic posts. The NNTP system

was designed in the days of 1200 Baud modems and 40MB drives. It tries

quite hard to minimize the amount of redundant data being stored, and

expects NNTP servers to purge old posts on a fairly regular basis. It's

unusual to find servers that carry anything over a month old.

That's only half of the truth.

It's correct that most (if not all) news servers have expiration times

for the posts, but these times vary significantly.

In Usenet, 30 to 90 days are common. However, the CadSoft servers (at

least the support and userchat groups) have much longer times.

Currently, I can access posts back to October 2005 in support.eng

(as an example).

The assumption was always that news reader clients would allow the user

to save any post that was of longer term interest. My client (Turnpike)

has a very clear "Keep" button on the message viewer which instructs it

not to expire its local copy of the post being viewed. But that still

relies on me fetching (and reading) these groups faster than the CadSoft

server's expire time.

Most newsreaders can be configured for "online" or "offline" use of a

group. In online configuration, all posts are loaded exactly when you

read them, with nothing but a local cache eventually. Using groups

offline means all content is stored locally. This causes longer download

times when connecting to the server, since all measages have to be

downloaded - but then it allows for searching in the message bodies, not

only the headers.

Your (Warren) problem might be a default configuration of OE that

downloads only the headers or posts of the last 30 days. To get all

available posts, you need to unsubscribe, change the setting, and then

subscribe to the groups again (AFAIK - I am not using OE).

And while you're at this, you might consider using a newsreader that

cares more about international standards, OE ist somewhat ignorant in

this concern. There are many free programs (Thunderbird, SeaMonkey,

Forte Agent etc.) - and at least the first two ask you how many headers

resp. posts they should download when you subscribe to a group.

There is a web site somewhere that has been plugged in to every public

NNTP feed in the world, and has been archiving it all for posterity. So

Google is often quite good at digging up old UseNet postings.

This only helps if Google archives a particular group - which is not the

case for the support groups at the CadSoft news server. I am not aware

of an archive that keeps older posts of the CadSoft newsgroups (which

are not part of the Usenet, BTW).

For web access and searches (if the newsreader is configured for online

use), the mirror at eaglecentral is fine - provided the search function

works as expected...

Tilmann

warrenbrayshaw wrote on Sat, 03 July 2010 04:51

The Element14 site will not be a place I will visit simply because it

takes

too long to get the data to me. An IP search stated it serves from

Switzerland. Here, data from the UK is known to be slow. Just to many

nodes

to reach us. Now this example from Switzerland is on that list,

assuming the

bottleneck is not with the hosting server. Surprisingly I have never

considered Germany a slow source.. On the other hand the Eagle Central

site

serving out of Arizona USA is fine being 1/4 of a world closer.

I don't think this has much to do with geographic location but rather how

well connected the servers are, which effects the number of routers between

you and the server.

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

"Warren Brayshaw" wrote:

>2) Searching for previous posts is a challenge. I'm new to news readers

not if you have them in your local message base.

>having been a forum person over the years. I do find the newsreader faster

>(better) on a daily basis for checking the newest postings. I have yet to

>understand how to obtain the historical posts from the newsreader feed. Some

>tips would be appreciated.

It depends on your news client. I can set the limits (how many

messages pulled) in a general setting, and override it for each group

in the group properties. Set it to 50000 and you likely get enough

information (Cadsoft keeps the messages very long).

>Eagle Central serves my needs most of the time. It's the quickest reference

>I have found, so far, for the Eagle bug fixes over all the version 5

>releases. Found in  the "Announce" forum duplication on Eagle Central

>... but I have one gripe, the search engine, and forums with the best search

>ability win the forum wars.

Get a decent news client, it should have the best search capabilities.

If needed, use grep or similar to search the message base directly.

>I wanted information on PAD_NAMES as in "set PAD_NAMES ON | OFF"

My old Forte Agent searches exactly for the string "PAD_NAMES".

Oliver