newsbin.com

For the past month or two, I can't get newsbin to display *any* subjects for any newsgroups.

When I download the latest updates, the new subjects appear for a short time, but then disappear. I can't see any subjects even if I do a "show all posts".

I may have a damaged database, but I'm hoping it's a switch I'm missing. Searches work fine, by the way.

Any suggestions?

What do you have the Display age setting at? Having that too small might give something like what you describe (although I would still expect SOME posts to show).

Another possibility is that you have some sort of filter set that is hiding the posts. Toggling the filters on/off should give a clue as to whether this is the case.

So they display momentarily and then vanish?

I think Itimpi is correct and it's something to do with the filters. In the options I'd select "Open Data Folder". Then exit Newsbin. From the newly opened windows I'd rename or delete "filters.db3". Then restart and try again.

If you have "Hide Old" showing in the display of the post list. I'd also turn that off.

Display age is set to 30 days, but I also tried older dates, and also "Show All Files", Subjects will appear for a short time then vanish.

Fails with filters on or off. Display settings is set to "none". I tried to rename the filters.db3, still fails.

Do I need to wipe my newsbin database completely and start over? I'm guessing since no one else has the problem, it's some sort of database corruption.

I can send the NewsBin.nbi file.

Is your PC's date correct? Newsbin depends in the date being correct.

I think I had one other report of this and we never came up with a solution. It's got to be solvable though. There's just not much to it. If they're loading and you see them, they must be getting filtered out.

How about going into the search tab, set it for "Internet" and try a search. See if things show up?

You could pick a single group and re-download headers from it and see if that fixes that group.

Date is correct. "Internet" searches are fine, "local" are not.

Tried to re-download a group - subjects appeared for a while then disappeared as soon as I tried to search, filter, etc. Can't get them back now no matter what I do.

This is just a regular windows PC? I'm going to try deleting my filters db and see what happens.

Windows 7 64bit. Nothing special about PC. I mostly use it via remote desktop. Worked fine until a few months ago.

What is your Storage Age set to under Options/Setup?

Also, did you try Itimpi's suggestion of toggling the filters on/off and see if there is a difference? You do this by hitting the power button icon at the top of the post list.

Storage age is 0. I set it to 3600 (nearly 10 years, so shouldn't delete anything), and things are working more-or-less fine, i.e. subjects are appearing.

I'll try setting it back to 0.

Changing storage age from 3600 to 0 causes NewsBin to start failing again - i.e. not displaying Subjects.

Changing from 1 to (randomly) 4000 - Subjects are now displayed normally.

I'm going to leave it at 4000 for now.

(By the way tried toggling filters on/off many times - no change in behavior.)

I'll try setting it back to 0.

Zero is always wrong. You're basically telling Newsbin to throw away all the headers it downloads. You can set it to anything you want but you can set it to a value that makes Newsbin fairly useless which seems to be the case here.

How many days worth of headers do you want to keep on hand? I keep 2000 but that's many gigs of disk space. If you only download new stuff, 30 is probably fine. If you want to download older files, it needs to be large enough not to purge these older files.

I assumed that (like most other settings) zero meant no limit, i.e., never delete.

I don't want to ever delete headers, I have plenty of disk space so I prefer to keep everything.

I'm pretty sure it's been set to zero for a long time with no problems. I'm not absolutely certain of this, but I certainly don't remember changing the value.

Forever is fine. I mean if you want to keep them forever it's fine. Servers though don't have "forever" retention. I use Giga and Astra and neither one is good out much beyond 1400 days. You can still get stuff older than that but 1400 days seems to be where the data gets kinda iffy. You need to watch and see if it looks like the download will work.

It probably was true that 0 once meant forever. I decide at some point that special magical numbers were a bad idea. Now I try for literal value. It's likely you'll need to re-download headers because setting it to zero will purge the old headers.