Subj : newslink.js - import PTRs
To   : Ash-Fox
From : Digital Man
Date : Sat Nov 17 2007 09:10 pm

  Re: newslink.js - import PTRs
  By: Ash-Fox to DOVE-Net.Synchronet_JavaScript on 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.

That's because branch_limit is a property of the 'js' object, so you would want
to use:

js.branch_limit = 0;

instead.

 > 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.

A disconnection will not cause the PTRs to not be updated. Only a JS exception
(like the infinite loop detection) would cause that.

 > 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.

I'd suggest limiting the number of messages downloaded per execution of
newslink.js and that'll avoid the problem altogether with no modification of
newslink.js necessary.

                                       digital man (xbox-live: digitlman)

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