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Earlier this month Critical Path (whom some will remember from some of our early anti-spam trials), announced the sale of certain assets of its SuperNews Usenet access business, including its software, commercial customer base, trade names and other elements of goodwill, to Giganews, an industry leader in Usenet newsgroup services.
You can see the actual news release here.

For the benefit of those who haven’t yet made the connection, it’s worth mentioning that last year we outsourced the provisioning of our Usenet service to Supernews. You can see the original announcement regarding this proposal here.

Giganews recently made contact with us to advise that on March 31 they will be renumbering Supernews’ message headers to match that of their new backend services.

Without going into too much technical detail, each newsgroup post is assigned an article number. These article numbers are then used by your news client to establish the order that posts are made in, what headers/posts have been downloaded and/or read and what headers/posts are yet to be downloaded.

Under normal circumstances these article numbers would never change. On the rare occasions that they do though, it confuses your news client and basically causes it to forget everything it’s ever done. Those who have been with us a while may remember the last time we had to do this and some of the problems that were encountered.

Once the Supernews’ headers have been renumbered, it’s likely that you will start to experience problems. Whilst the following list is not intended to be exhaustive, this includes:

• Posts to our private moderated newsgroups stop appearing eg. p.s.customer-feedback and p.s.status.
• Your news client starts downloading the headers and/or bodies of messages it has already retrieved.
• Posts that are marked as read become unread.
• Headers appear with missing bodies eg. clicking on a post fails to retrieve the message.

Whilst we appreciate the inconvenience this will cause PlusNet Usenet subscribers, on this occasion it is sadly outside of our control.

The steps you will need to take following the maintenance to resolve any issues will vary from one news client to the next. One sure-fire way to restore access to all of your groups is to delete the news account from your mail program, recreate it and then resubscribe to all of your groups. Some customers however, may want to try a less-aggressive approach first to minimise disruption.

Giganews themselves have offered the following words of advice to their customers:

On March 31, 2008, newsgroup header numbering will be reset to match that of our new backend services. On that date, you will be able to easily make this transition by simply purging and reloading the headers of the subscribed newsgroups in your news client. Instructions for conducting this action in various news clients are included at the end of this email. If your preferred client is not included, please refer to the specific help documentation for the client.

NewsBin Pro:

1. Select all newsgroups you are subscribed to. To select all newsgroups, click on the first group then hold the shift key and click on the last group.

2. From the Groups menu, select “Post Storage”, then “Delete Stored Posts”.

3. Download headers again. For large binary newsgroups, this may take a long time. To limit the headers, right-click on the newsgroup name and select “Download Special”.

NewsLeecher:

1. Select all newsgroups you are subscribed to. To select all newsgroups, click on the first group then hold the shift key and click on the last group.

2. Right-click on the selected newsgroups. From the popup menu, click
“Selected: Purge Group”.

3. Download headers again. For large binary newsgroups, this may take a long time. To limit the headers, right-click on the newsgroup name, select “Update” and choose the number of headers you would like.

Thunderbird and Outlook Express:

Because these are primarily email clients, there is no way to purge headers. You will need to remove your current server, create a new server for Supernews, download the list of available newsgroups, and re-subscribe to your desired newsgroups.

Forte Agent:

1. Select the folder containing your newsgroups, right-click and select “Purge”.

2. Download headers again. For large binary newsgroups, this may take a long time.

.

In short though, if you’re a PlusNet Usenet subscriber then you should expect some degree of disruption next Monday

The planned maintenance post for this work can be seen here.

Bob

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This entry was posted by bobpullen on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is tagged with giganews, news, newsgroups, Service Status, supernews, Usenet and is posted in the category Customer Support Centre, General PlusNet News, PlusNet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.