Re: [Pan-users] Trying to use 'new' Pan

[Duncan]

Maurice Batey posted on Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:11:26 +0100 as excerpted:

> On Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:01:45 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 
>>  For groups that appear on multiple servers, that presents a
>> problem when you post to that group, as pan now has to figure out which
>> server to post to.
> 
>   That surprises me! Surely Pan knows from which server it fetched the
> group, so if I reply to a posting it will know which server to post to?

The point is, it fetches the group from ALL servers that have it 
available, with individual messages coming from whatever server pan 
happened to request it from first, if it's on more than one, or from 
whichever server has that particular if there's a propagation issue and 
it hasn't reached the others.  Pan doesn't have any idea which of them 
you want to post to unless it is told, and as a result, it doesn't even 
track it to that level.  It simply does what it is told by the posting 
profile.

Which makes sense.  Because at least back when ISPs still normally had 
news servers, a user might get most of their posts from the ISP's server, 
but have a paid account for fills.  But the ISP's server very often 
included a non-anonymized nntp-posting-host header, while the paid server 
would anonymize it so only the server abuse folks could track it back to 
a specific account.  Additionally, paid accounts normally don't charge 
for posting, only downloads, since they'd have to download the posts from 
other peers otherwise anyway.  The two factors combined mean that many 
users had/have a strong preference for posting thru the paid server that 
anonymizes their posts, even if they're getting the majority of their 
messages from a free/isp-bundled account.

So pan simply tracks whether the server has that group or not.  If it 
doesn't, it'll warn you before the post goes thru, and you can either 
cancel the posting attempt and change the profile, or let it try to post 
anyway, despite the group not being on record as existing on that 
server.  But other than that, pan doesn't care, it simply posts to 
whatever server you have configured for it to post to, in the posting 
profile you've chosen.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman