"T. Valko" wrote:
BTW, I tried posting a reply to this thread that
contained the offending character string and as
you can see (or, in this case, can not see!) it didn't show up.

Patient: Doctor, my head hurts when I bang it against the wall like this!

Doctor: Don't do that.

(Well, it got lots of laughs on vaudeville stages.)


There is a private ng dedicated to this topic
(ng problems) and it's monitored by someone from MS.
I'll post a link to this thread in that ng.

Thanks. I can provide a summary of the hundreds of NNTP network traces that
resulted from my many hours of experimentation over the past 3 days, if
that's necessary to convince any MS engineer or IT person that the problem
is real and exactly as I described it.


----- original message -----

"T. Valko" wrote in message
...
what can we do to get this corrected?
MVPs might have communication channels that we "mere mortals" do not.

There is a private ng dedicated to this topic (ng problems) and it's
monitored by someone from MS. I'll post a link to this thread in that ng.

BTW, I tried posting a reply to this thread that contained the offending
character string and as you can see (or, in this case, can not see!) it
didn't show up.

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Joe User" <joeu2004 wrote in message
...
"Rick Rothstein" wrote:
I guessing this is something new with the Microsoft
servers as I cannot believe those letters have never
been posted in a thread sometime in the past to this,
or any other, Microsoft server.

I agree.

It is not unusual for us to suggest solutions that include the
26-character string "ab...yz", for example.

Then again, there are the common example names like Company X#Y#Z
(without #) in the following message, which I do not see on the MSNews
server today:

From:
Subject: Sumproduct wildcard
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:13:01 -0800
Message-ID:
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.excel.misc

Lastly, there may also be other contributing factors that I did not
explore, in particular the content type, charset and encoding of the
message. I am not saying that it is a factor. I am simply saying that I
did not bother to consider that factor in my experiments.



I wonder when it started?

I think that will be almost impossible to answer with any credibility.

First, the MSNews server retains only the last 90 days of messages. At
least, that seems to be the retention policy for the m.p.excel* NGs.

Second, even if we see evidence of lost messages within the last 90 days,
we cannot determine if the deletion process was in effect that long ago,
or if the deletion process was started more recently and it scrubbed the
NGs of offending messages posted earlier.

For example, I cannot find the following message in the MSNews server,
which contains the 26-character string "AB...YZ". (The MSNews server has
m.p.e.w-f messages dating back to 4 Oct 2009.)

From: "RagDyeR"
Subject: Insert single quote symbol
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:56:22 -0700
Message-ID:
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions

Even if someone has that message (not just the header) in their
computer's "cache", we cannot know if they simply got lucky and read the
message before it was deleted soon thereafter.


I think the more important question is: what can we do to get this
corrected?

MVPs might have communication channels that we "mere mortals" do not. I
hope you take advantage of every opportunity to make MS aware of this
problem. I know: you are probably speaking with the wrong group within
MS. But perhaps they can pass along the information.

The rest of us will have to settle with submitting "feedback" messages
through the MS support web site. I don't know how effective that will
be.


----- original message ------

"Rick Rothstein" wrote in message
...
That is quite interesting Joe... thanks for making the analysis. I
guessing this is something new with the Microsoft servers as I cannot
believe those letters have never been posted in a thread sometime in the
past to this, or any other, Microsoft server. I wonder when it started?

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"Joe User" <joeu2004 wrote in message
...
Rick Rothstein and I had similar experiences recently: posting
responses
that failed to appear on the MSNews server. Of course, there can be
many
factors that be the cause.

But in our cases, the problem exists on the MSNews server. I will
explain
in more detail below. But the upshot of it all is....

Do not include the characters x y z (any capitalization) without
interstitial spaces, either in the subject or message body.

The MSNews server deletes any message that contains that character
sequence.

The deletion usually happens immediately after receiving the message,
either
from a newsreader or from another news server. But sometimes, the
deletion
occurs minutes later. Consquently, the message might or might not get
propagated to other servers before it is deleted on the MSNews server.

For the same reason, the message might appear momentarily on the MSNews
server, allowing you to read it. And if you use Outlook Express,
Windows
Mail or any other newsreader that maintains its own message archive on
your
computer, you might think the message persists longer "on the MSNews
server"
than it really does simply because it is on your computer.

But someone else might not see your message on the MSNews server
because
they looked later. And if you reset and resynch the NG, the message
will no
longer appear. Another symptom is that you might get a "removed from
server" error when you try to read a message whose header is already in
the
newsreader archive on your computer.

Originally, I misinterpreted the deferred deletion as an "intermittent"
failure to post the message. But the behavior is actually consistent.

Also, I had conjectured that this "filtering" (deletion) was related to
messages or responses to messages that originated on Google Groups. In
the
final analysis, that has nothing to do with it.

Note: I can only confirm this behavior when the x y z character
sequence
(without interstitial spaces) is in the subject or message body. But I
suspect it can also be triggered when the character sequence occurs in
any
message header, which includes random character sequences that we have
no
control over.

I come to these conclusions based on a careful analysis of the NNTP
protocol
in network traces.

The network traces reveal that the MSNews server always receives and
accepts
the messages. They also reveal that the news server assigns an article
index to the message before it is deleted. And the network traces
demonstrate that the messages are deleted sometimes in less than 0.2
sec and
sometimes after more than 5 min. Finally, in a sampling of 28 deleted
messages, only about 11 of them were propagated to the Google Groups
server.

(I presume that they were also propagated to other news servers, e.g.
the MS
Discussion Groups server. But I stopped monitoring the MSDG server
because
the propagation delay is typically 30-35 min, at least in recent days.)

The deferred deletions and inconsistent propagation to other news
servers
suggests to me that the messages are always stored on the MSNews server
initially, and independent separate processes forward and delete the
messages afterward.