Re: How to best monitor threads on this site

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry


Dave Peterson Wrote:
If you're going to use OE as your newsreader, you may want to ask in one
of the newsgroups dedicated to OE.


Thanks Dave, Great advice. If only Microsoft took lessons from
you....

This response (following your advice) seems to explain the problem:

[color=blue]
When you post a news message, it is initially only available on the
news
server that you used. Depending on how busy the news server is, it
might take a few seconds, a few minutes, or a few hours before the
message is available for reading. And only people who use the same
news
server can read your post, at that point.

Periodically, the news server contacts one or more other news servers.
It passes on any new posts that it has in public news groups and in
turn
receives any new posts that the other servers have. If the received
posts are for a news group that the server carries, the server keeps a
copy. In this fashion, a news post is propagated to other news
servers
around the world. This is not entirely reliable. It can take days
for
a message to make it to another news server. And many messages
disappear into the Internet bit bucket. If you post 5 messages on
news
server "A", posts 1, 2, 4 and 5 might make it to news server "B" and
1,
3 and 4 might make it to news server "C".

If the owner of a news server is interested in getting most of the
news
posts, they will make sure that have news feeds from multiple other
news
servers which also have multiple other feeds. Some news servers
routinely get only about 50% of the news posts. A better news server
would get more than 90%. There is no way to guarantee 100% coverage.

The owner (system administrator) of each news server decides which
newsgroups to carry. It is impractical for a news server to carry
every
newsgroup (there are tens of thousands of news groups with millions of
new messages every day totally gigabytes). The newsgroups carried is
based on the news server's target audience. Also, the administrator
determines how long the messages should be kept. This often varies by
newsgroup. Discussion groups tend to be several weeks, whereas binary
groups tend towards several days due to their larger disk space
requirements. Also a news server may filter out messages based on
size
and/or content.

For best results, use the "msnews.microsoft.com" news server for
reading
and posting messages regarding help with Microsoft products. This is
the news server that most of the regulars use. You'll get more timely
messages, and miss fewer of them.
[color]

So it seems the prime problem probably relates to inadequacies in the
feeds received by my ISP.

Simple to test you would think? I'll just replace them with
"msnews.microsoft.com" as my news server - after all this group
(microsoft.public.excel.misc) provides high volume quality support on
microsoft excel problems.

Guess what? Microsoft doesn't support this Excel support group on
their news server!!!! Even though this forum is supported by MVPs.
Unbelievable. They apparently want us to pay them $50 a pop for them
to tell us that whatever the issue was is not their fault.

Purchasing a better service might solve the problem, but who knows? At
this stage the newsreader option isn't an option.

The excelforum.com site, unlike other forums, unfortunately doesn't
have a "new posts on my threads" option. I'll test using the
subscribed threads option here but it looks pretty unworkable. I'll
also test Google groups - with a mouse click I can easily tag messages
there and see all tagged threads with a mouse click, and they receive
postings quicker.


--
John James
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John James's Profile: http://www.excelforum.com/member.php?action=getinfo&userid=32690
View this thread: http://www.excelforum.com/showthread.php?threadid=533414

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