Subj : Re: NNTP server
To   : Static
From : g00r00
Date : Wed Dec 08 2021 11:23 am

St> Yeah third party tossers would certainly throw a monkey wrench
St> regardless of  what Mystic does. Without a stored MSGID you could
St> possibly use other fields to generate a consistent NNTP message ID on
St> the fly but then the question would be what fields are sufficiently
St> static and up to the task? Some combination of datewritten + sendername
St> + the message base name?

In the case of the article ID it has to be more than that, since the article ID needs to be able to consistantly resolve to a message.  A date written and name would be too vague.  Sometimes when messages are processed in batch it'll be possible for two messages to have the same datestamp from the same person.

Mystic uses a unique identifier and some hash values along with the primary key of the message base to generate the article ID.  This way it can figure out the base and then more quickly perform a lookup using the hash first to limit the result set (before loading the full message to check the MSGID for a match).

The NNTP server can create MSGID on the fly if they are missing so it will always generate an article ID (which I have enabled now).  My concern with doing that was there will be added risk of message base corruption if the NNTP server needs to do massive updates to generate unique IDs at the same time something like message tossing is happening.

In order to reduce the amount of times the NNTP server needs to generate MSGIDs I went back and changed things (in the next build) so that Mystic will always generate MSGID even if its a local, newsgroup, or QWK networked base...

The only remaining thing would be to add MSGID on the fly when tossing messages from QWK and Fido networks.  I've added it into QWK tossing now too but for Fido I am a little hesistant to do so.  Technically adding a missing MSGID would be changing message content and anytime Mystic's tosser has the option to do that there is a subset of Fido people who have huge meltdowns over it.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/06 (Windows/64)
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