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MS Office Forum / Excel / New Users / January 2006MVP: Pls help
Please forgive this off-topic inquiry. I appreciate your indulgence and your patience. Can some tell me what MS Community Newsgroup or public newsgroup (e.g. microsoft.public.*), if any, that I can post to in order to get help or a knowledgable explanation about missing articles that I posted to MS CN, or to confirm a potential problem with MS CN? I sent email to Customer Service. Either they are clueless, or they treat everyone with a question as if they are novices. I am far from that. In any case, Customer Service has been no help so far. I have searched the list of MS CNs and public newsgroups, but I did not find one that seemed on-topic. Alternatively, perhaps someone can offer some insight into the problem. I posted two responses using MS CN. Even as long as, now, 29 hours later, the responses do not appear in MS CN. However, the articles are visible in the corresponding public newsgroup using Google Groups. (The second posted response was an abridged version of the first response -- an attempt to repost while at the same time "correcting" a presumed problem with the original article.) My question is: why aren't the articles visible using MS CN? It is not a question of delay, first because other articles that I posted later do appear in a timely manner in that MS CN, and second because the "delay" has really been too long. I suspect that the articles might have been too long. Does MS CN have a limit on article size, be it lines or characters? Alternatively, perhaps there is a problem with the article records on the MS CN news server(s) -- that is, something is out of sync. But honestly, I am not familiar enough with NNTP and how news servers are implemented to speculate further. I could try reposting "the" article again, but breaking it into two responses in the hopes of (a) bypassing any size limit, and (b) "resyncing" with the news server. But having done that once already (but not __drastically__ reducing the size), I am relunctant to take another "shot in the dark" without some knowledgable insight into the root cause of the problem might be. TIA. Hi Joe, I'm not sure I can help but what's MS "CN" and what are the titles of your posts? People using Outlook Express sometimes need to reset their newsgroups and re-download everything to see posts they're looking for. With the title of the post maybe somebody else can verify that they can or can't see your posts, which would help in finding out if the problem is limited to you or happens to everyone.  SignatureCindy Winegarden MCSD, Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP cindy_winegarden@msn.com www.cindywinegarden.com > Please forgive this off-topic inquiry. I appreciate your indulgence > and your patience. [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > in order to get help or a knowledgable explanation about > missing articles that I posted to MS CN, ...... > I'm not sure I can help I would appreciate any effort -- at least a pointer to the correct newsgroup in which to discuss this problem. > what's MS "CN" Microsoft Community Newsgroups at http://support.microsoft.com/newsgroups. > what are the titles of your posts? I posted two similar responses to the same thread. The first and longer response was: References: <8C7B318E-ED6F-419D-B532-3952F807915E@microsoft.com> Subject: RE: XNPV vs. NPV(quarterly) different results Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 20:09:02 -0800 Lines: 184 Message-ID: <CFE0229F-07A1-49F5-B4D1-2F8C678F10E6@microsoft.com> Newsgroups: microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions The second response was the same thread, except without quoting the original posting to which I was replying, based on a theory that the length of either the total message or the quoted text or the structure of the quote text (which includes tab characters) triggered some blocking rule. I believe the second response is about 120 lines. I also posted a third highly-abbreviated response to the same thread. That posting __is__ visible using MS Community Newsgroups as well as Google Groups. > People using Outlook Express sometimes need to > reset their newsgroups and re-download everything > to see posts they're looking for. I do not believe this is a trivial usage problem. I am a very experienced user of the newsgroups. As noted above, some of my postings succeed even, whereas others have not for the same thread. I use IE, not OE. Moreover, I am no stranger to these newsgroups. If you do a search for "joeu2004", you should discover a great many postings of mine, mostly helpful(?) responses. I post using either Google Groups or MS Community Newsgroups. Both are web interfaces. I have used Google Groups for many years. I have used MS Community Newsgroups for a few months. I started using MS Community Newsgroups when I discovered that some MSCN postings do not appear in GG. > With the title of the post maybe somebody else can > verify that they can or can't see your posts The first two postings to that thread are not visible using MS Community Newsgroups, but they are visible using Google Groups. The third posting to that thread is visible using MSCN as well as GG. > which would help in finding out if the problem is > limited to you or happens to everyone. I serious doubt that "the problem" is limited to me. But to be clear, "the problem" is that the posted articles are not visible specifically using MS Community Newsgroups. I would expect that are visible when using some other news service, since the articles were obvious transmitted across the internet, as evidence by their visibility using Google Groups. My suspicion is that MS Community Newsgroup has some import rules that block "large" articles, or that the MSCN news server got out of sync with that thread, perhaps due to an intermittent internal error when it might have first archived the articles, which were posted using MSCN. Typically I believe that news server will not import articles from the network if the articles were posted on one of their own news servers. But I hasten to reiterate that while I am an extremely experienced newsgroup user and frequent contributor, I know almost nothing about NNTP, the news service protocol, and how the news service works in general. Hi Joe, Other people call those newsgroups "the web interface to the Microsoft public newsgroups," which is why I was confused. In Outlook Express I am able to read your 3 posts. Via the web interface I can see only one of them. I posted a message to one of the test groups that was 3 times as long as your longest message and the whole text showed up. I'll forward your issue to my contacts at Microsoft. SignatureCindy Winegarden MCSD, Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP cindy_winegarden@msn.com www.cindywinegarden.com >> I'm not sure I can help > [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > Message-ID: <CFE0229F-07A1-49F5-B4D1-2F8C678F10E6@microsoft.com> > Newsgroups: microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions > I'll forward your issue to my contacts at Microsoft. I really do appreciate that. I have gotten nowhere via the microsoft.com Contact Us web form. Thanks for confirming that there is no arbitrary length limitation. This problem gets stranger and stranger by the moment. Inspired by Cindy's efforts, I decided to try some methodical tests of my own. When I repost the original reply (cut-and-paste from Google Groups), the posting initially is visible using the MSCN interface when I look almost immediately after submission. But when I look a minute or so later, the posting is gone(!). Yet, when I post the same text to the "test here" newsgroup (microsoft.public.test.here), as Cindy did, using the MSCN interface, the posting seems to "stick". That is, it is not removed later. With one caveat: every reply in the "test here" newsgroup replaces the message being replied to(!). This is true whether or not the post message has "RE:" in the Subject line. I don't know why that happens with my postings. Clearly that is not the case with the spam test postings that are flooding the "test here" newsgroup today :-(. I have a theory about the posted-then-removed articles in the MSCN newsgroup. I know nothing about the topology of the MSCN network. But it is not uncommon to have several tiers of application servers for such services. Based on that assumption, I suspect the server where the submission is made initially archives the posting local, perhaps only temporarily. The submission is passed to a back-end server, which performs some sanity checks. For unknown reasons, my posting fails the checks. So the back-end server removes the posting from the local archive. Just a wild guess, of course. But the model does fit what I observed, and it is not an unreasonable implementation of a complex news server architecture. (By the way, I would hope the MSCN news server maintains log files, which might help to confirm or disprove my theory.) Thanks again, Cindy, for taking an interest in this problem. Joe, I have experienced similar problems to you recently in that some (but not all) my postings are taking a very long time before they appear - I use IE and access through Google Groups. Dave Peterson responded to my posts ("Advice on timing of posts appearing" and "Link to a changing cell? You'll see ...") by suggesting that Google is having problems at the moment. I find it very frustrating, but I have not yet had any postings which get lost, as you seem to have suffered with MS CN. Pete And Joe, my posting was made on Jan 7 at 11:47pm - it just seemed to have got lost for a day. Incidentally, it is now Jan 9 at 9:40am. Let's see whaen this appears! Pete Hi Pete It appeared (timed at 9:39) at 9:59 on my system here in the UK. SignatureRegards Roger Govier > And Joe, > [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > Pete > I have experienced similar problems to you recently > in that some (but not all) my postings are taking a > very long time before they appear That is not the problem. As I noted in my original article, the posting had not appeared even 29 hours later. It has now been 3.5 days, and they still are not visible. The article does appear on remote news servers -- namely Google Groups -- but it is not visible on the news server from which it was submitted. That is not inexplicable, given the complex tiered system of servers that some service providers adopt; but I think it is unlikely, given the way that I believe news server archives work. Moreover, as I updated recently, I discovered that reposted versions of that article do appear briefly immediately on the news server where they are submitted, but they are subsequently removed within a minute or so. (Caveat: That might be due to the similarity of the content of the postings. I notice that those repostings also do not appear in Google Groups more than 12 hours later. Perhaps some versions of news server software now attempt to thwart spam flooding by removing what appears to be duplicates of the same article -- text that differs by less than X%. Just a guess.) Finally, it is only that article (reposted several times) that this has happened to. In the same time frame, I posted a dozen other articles -- including a very brief response to the same thread -- with no problem. |
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