Subj : newslink.js - import PTRs
To   : DOVE-Net.Synchronet_JavaScript
From : Ash-Fox
Date : Fri Nov 16 2007 04:04 pm

Greetings all,

Recently I've linked my BBS to a rather unreliable news server (there is
unique groups on there that other news servers don't have). Unfortunately
because of it's unreliability I've had a bunch of issues trying to mirror
all the content, as I keep running into various problems such as:

- Random disconnects
- Infinite loop (100000000 branches) detected issue

To get around the Infinite loop problem, I tried setting at the beginning of
newslink.js the following:

branch_limit = "0";

Unfortunately, that seems to do nothing at all.

Whenever a random issue happens, be it disconnection or infinite loop, the
message import PTRs are not updated, so, the BBS starts from the beginning
and ignores a bunch of messages after downloading them as it already has
them.

I looked at the sourcecode of where the pointers are retrieved, from my
understanding it's from the .snl file in /data/subs/. Unfortunately when I
open it up, it's in some binary format I don't quite understand. Looking at
the javascript code, used newslink.js, I'm just not getting how it's set.
So I can't manually fix the number.

I've resorted to temporarily hardcoding the PTR number in the newslink.js,
but I think a better workaround would be updating the PTR number in
the .snl file everytime a article is downloaded, rather than when the
entire transaction is complete.

While I do more or less understand what's going on in newslink.js, I'm
really confused about what I would need to modify in the file to make this
happen and would appreciate help on this. I also consider the fact that
PTRs aren't updated with every article download is a bug.

~Ash-Fox

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