Michael Gueterman writes (in response to a general theme concerning lost
posts, but specifically in response to Ken Nutsford's comments):

> Ditto, I've seen them all except I receive the individual postings.
>  I received them on:
>  Sep 11 @ 8:19am PDT
>  Sep 13 @ 9:05am PDT
>  Sep 15 @ 3:03pm PDT

I, too, have seen all of Ken's posts. But I no longer believe that that means
with assurance that everyone has. I believe that the problem of lost posts is
becoming increasingly severe -- and because of that, I've been observing the
process with some diligence for the last several months.

The problem is not only affecting the HP3000-L. It is associated with every
newsgroup that I post to. The propagation delay between the list and the
newsgroup is now quite often as much as six days. And I know that a great
many of the posts are simply getting lost in the translation.

In regards to Ken's post, I searched DejaNews with the phrase

     HP3000 Model 70

and found only one posting, his most recent. The other two are simply not
there. That's a success rate of 33%, rather poor even for non-HP
computational machinery.

I have always had my HP3000-L settings set so as to reflect my messages back
to me. It's not egotistical (as Neil Harvey suggests :-). Rather it is my
complete lack of faith in all things computational. Because I post often (and
because I am the source of much of the off-topic spam that can be
legitimately criticized), I get a fairly good measure of the reliability of
at least my own postings. Unfortunately, I have been seeing a 10-20% loss
rate over the last six months.

I have no idea where the problem is. Because I prefer to use AOL for open
traffic -- and because I am more than willing to blame AOL for anything --
the source of the problem could easily be theirs. However, I don't think so.
In the Friday posting that I duplicated on Sunday, Jeff Woods said that at
least he saw posting correcting my copyright comments. Thus, the posting at
least left AOL outbound and made it to the HP3000-L server for
redistribution. But it never made it back to me by e-mail. Nor did it ever
make to any of the newsgroup readers that I monitor.

I didn't duplicate that posting without first checking the newsgroup many
times. I have three newsreader sources available to me (AOL, my ISP's, and
DejaNews). For several months now, I've been checking all of them to see
about the correlation in postings that they receive for all of the primary
newsgroups that I care about. I regret to report that the three newsreaders
rarely correlate at greater than the 90% level -- and most often at about
75-80%. There are always postings in any (random) one of the newsreaders that
never show up in the others.

Indeed, I've now come to believe that the only way that I can hold a
conversation -- especially on a critical topic -- over an extended period of
time is to constantly monitor all three newsreaders.

Wirt Atmar