Re: groups with numeric names

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Lars Balker Rasmussen <lbr@mjolner.dk> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

>> No, because there isn't any group "alt" [...]

> Uh-oh.

Whoops.  :)

> % telnet news nntp
> Trying 130.225.16.11...
> Connected to gjallar.daimi.aau.dk.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 200 news.daimi.aau.dk InterNetNews NNRP server INN 1.5.1 17-Dec-1996 ready
> group alt
> 211 2 59 2600 alt
           ^^^^

Notice that?  Your news server thinks that the last article in the group
"alt" is article #2600.  Since if you carry alt.2600 that's not an article
but rather is a directory, this almost certainly indicates that your news
server is confused.

Anyone reading the group for the first time is likely to see all articles
between the current highest "real" article in the group and article 2600
show up as unavailable, and then their newsrc will likely mark all those
articles as read so that even when more articles come in they'll never
show up.

This is one of the many ways in which all-numeric group names can cause
problems.

Personally, I'd solve this problem by rmgrouping "alt", since it's likely
to have about the same sort of traffic as "general" or any of the other
top-level groups (ie, mostly spam).  But that's just me.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>