The Case of the Missing Posts
in rasnm

Contact Marty Moleski, SJ for more help.

rec.autos.sport.nascar.moderated has been online since August of 1998.

We have had many complaints from users that they cannot send posts to the group.

This is extremely frustrating for all involved. The group is not busy enough to lose any people who are interested in discussing stock-car racing. A newsgroup with no news is no fun. We want to hear what you want to say about stock-car racing. We value your participation in the group. We appreciate anything you can do to help us make the system work better.

If a post reaches our moderation software, we can track where it is in our system and find out what happened to it. The larger and more frequent problem is to find out what happened to posts that don't enter our moderation system.

How it is supposed to work:

John McCoy says this is how the system should work:

1. A poster sends message (via NNTP post) to his ISP's news server.

NNTP = Network News Transfer Protocol
ISP = Internet Service Provider

2. The news server sees the group is moderated, and looks up the email address of the moderator.

Is it possible this address is not correct in the official list of moderators addresses?

Could that list be mirrored incorrectly somewhere?

The news server is supposed to relay the post to rec-autos-sport-nascar-moderated@moderators.isc.org

3. The ISC.ORG sends the message (via SMTP) to the moderators email (SMTP) server.

Could that server be trying to rDNS the source server? Sometimes newsservers have weird DNS because they're actually two or more machines, one for reading & one for posting; if the moderators mail server thinks it's talking to another mailserver rather than a newsserver pretending to be a mailserver, something odd might happen.

The mail server at moderators.isc.org is supposed to relay the post to rasnm@carracing.com.

4. Moderator's email server passes the post to the moderation bot.

5. Modbot adds the approved header (or doesn't, if it doesn't like the post; in this case, the post goes to a human moderator for review--which may take some time, depending on what is happening in the moderator's life).

6. Modbot sends the message (via NNTP again) to moderators' news server (carracing.com), which distributes it to everyone else's news servers.

Verify the Problem

Keep a copy of the posts you send (date, time, subject).
After 24 hours (to allow all kinds of processing), check Google Groups for your posts.

Reasons for Failures

In Outlook Express, you must configure your NEWSGROUP identity independently of your e-mail identity. Check to make sure that you have something that looks like an e-mail address in your "From" field. The software needs to see something that looks like this:

________@____.___

moleski@canisius.edu

Brian Craddock says that filling in an address in the "reply-to" field of his newsreader seems to have helped get his posts through the system:

"My newsreader seems to work better when I match all my email addy's. I used the same addy on my newsreader that I use on Google. I tried this on Outlook, Outlook Ex., and Thunderbird email clients and it is working so far."
Altopia (run by Chris Caputo) has, at times, failed to configure moderated newsgroups as moderated. This means that posts through Altopia's NNTP server do not get sent into our moderation software. They are only visible to Altopia users and to other rogue news servers that do not adhere to the conventions for moderated groups.
Ask your news server: is rasnm configured as MODERATED? If not, the posts disappear into the bit bucket.

Brian Craddock: "Many ISP's have changed their news server from news.whatever.net to nntp.whatever.net and mine had done this and that's why my posts were getting lost. Just thought I would let you know for future reference on the missing post site. The reply to address was also part of the problem too. My tech guy said that would cause it to get lost too because of no return path."
Do you read other newsgroups? Have you had any similar trouble with them?
Could it be an SMTP problem?

Notes from Travis Mikalson:

I have one theory.. since approval requests go through email/SMTP at some point, you may need to use a valid email address to post to the newsgroup. Do all of the SMTP relays for moderators.isc.org also tolerate unknown domains for munged usenet email address purposes?

[tog@tog][~] $ host -t mx moderators.isc.org
moderators.isc.org mail is handled (pri=10) by rutgers.edu moderators.isc.org mail is handled (pri=10) by sprettur.isnet.is moderators.isc.org mail is handled (pri=10) by mail.uu.net moderators.isc.org mail is handled (pri=10) by chx400.switch.ch moderators.isc.org mail is handled (pri=10) by mailbox.ucsd.edu

That's quite a few SMTP relays that could reject unknown domains and such.

Actually if the problem is in the SMTP leg of the odyssey, the From: address will make the difference in whether or not it's rejected as an invalid/unknown domain, the Reply-To really doesn't affect that. The SMTP server will assume the Return-Path is the From: address if no Return-Path is explicitly specified. (again, anyone who has recently read the SMTP RFC, feel free to correct me.. I conject from observation) You can make your Reply-To whatever you want and a very picky SMTP server still wont care. So, please try not munging your From: address and then making a test post.

6. Is it an AOL problem?

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 02:34:21 CST, buggzzee23@aol.comspamsux (bud hufstetler) wrote:

AOL is my ISP.With AOL, when you click on "read my newsgroups" you get a list of the groups you're subcribed to.Each group listed shows how many total and how many unread articles are in that group.Many times the list shows more articles available than actually exist.

2 days ago, after reading the last of the unread articles, I posted 1 reply and 1 new thread.the list then showed 2 unread articles, but when I clicked to read the list of new articles, it showed none.When I checked the thread I replied to, my post doesnt show there either.

I went to google a few minutes ago, and found both posts there, along with many posts by others I hadnt seen before. So in my case at least,the posts made it to the group, but AOL isnt picking them up (and many more by other rasnm posters).I wonder if other AOL users have the same problem?

7. Are you sending plain text? The group prohibits the use of HTML. Please configure your newsreader to send plain text, unformatted.

8. Make sure that you have a SUBJECT specified in your post. Some bug in our system seems to prevent posts from going through with a blank subject heading.

We Don't Have ESP

Well, the moderators do, in fact, have ESP, but we've taken a vow against using our X-powers when dealing with mere mortals. This means that you have to tell us your e-mail address if you want us to talk with you about where your posts went.

If you spamproof your posts, any replies from the modbot or from the moderators will go into the bit bucket. You will never see them because you gave an e-mail address that doesn't work.

Please help us to help you. If you're having a problem, either include a human-decipherable set of clues to your real e-mail address or else send an e-mail to me or to the moderators.

Another funny side-effect of the mods not using our powers of ESP is that we don't know that missing posts are missing. That's because--now pay attention to this, it's a hard concept for some people to grasp--the [sometimes it's hard to be moderate, you know?] posts are [here comes the important part!] MISSING. When the posts don't arrive at our system or get mangled by our system, we don't know that something went wrong. Only you know that a post you sent didn't go through. When you give us the information necessary to search for the post, we will be happy to go look through our logs to try to see what happened to your post.

Ugly Workarounds

You can communicate with the newsgroup by sending e-mail to:
rec-autos-sport-nascar-moderated@moderators.isc.org or to rasnm@carracing.com. Sending posts as e-mail to either one of these addresses bypasses your news provider's lists.
You can read and respond through Google Groups.
You can start over with your news reader.

Get rid of all spamproofing in all fields.
Send test posts. They can be cancelled later to keep your address out of circulation.
Pay attention to error messages.
Re-introduce spamproofing one field at a time.

Subscribe to a different news server. I use newsguy. Other services are available.
Create a new identity at hotmail, yahoo, or gmail. Plan to let spammers have their way with the mail box. Try using the new address in your "from" and "reply-to" fields.