Known Bugs

This page lists the major known bugs in the latest release of Agent or Free Agent. (All bugs listed here appear in both programs unless stated otherwise.) We are actively working on fixing these, and we'll notify all registered users whenever we release a new version

Reorganization: We've been listing the bugs in rough order of importance, so that the worst ones appeared at the top of the list. But that makes it difficult to find new additions to the list, so from now on we'll be adding new items to the top of the list and including the date that they were added. This should make it easier for people to keep up to date.

Known bugs in Free Agent 1.0 / Agent .99 as of 7/17/95

Trouble upgrading from earlier versions: (7/17/95) Some people have reported database corruption when upgrading to Free Agent 1.0 / Agent .99 from earlier program versions. We haven't been able to replicate this problem ourselves, but we've seen enough reports to recommend that you back up your Agent directory (if possible) before upgrading.
Spurious "Too many articles to retrieve" errors: (7/17/95) The server can sometimes mislead Agent into thinking there are too many articles in a newsgroup to download. We need to make Agent smarter about detecting this situation; until then, see the FAQ pages for a workaround.
Incompatibilities with some Winsock drivers: (6/7/95) See our Winsock drivers page for a list of winsock drivers that can't be used with Agent. That page also lists any minor compatibility problems with drivers that otherwise work fine.
Auto-expand sometimes doesn't: (6/7/95) The option to automatically expand threads when you jump into them doesn't seem to work if you are in three-pane mode and have the focus in the body pane.
"Lines" field not set in posted messages: (5/8/95) Agent doesn't set the Lines field (the field that tells how many lines there are in the article) when posting an article, because we thought all news servers added it automatically. It turns out that some don't, so any article posted through them will end up with a header claiming that it has 0 lines. The article text is still there and can still be viewed, but many newsreaders will display it in the browser with a line count of 0.
Editing large articles is slow: (5/8/95) Inserting text in a large article is slow because of all the word-wrapping going on. We're looking at ways to speed this up by being smarter about detecting the end of the text that must be re-wrapped.
Possible incompatibility with OS/2: Several beta testers have reported that Agent doesn't run under OS/2 3.0 (Warp), while others report that it works fine. We're still investigating this, but we definitely intend to fix whatever problems exist here. See our OS/2 page for the latest information.
Can't display large articles: The message viewing window has a limit of 60K characters, and truncates any part of the message that exceeds that size. This affects only the display; all of the text will be there if you save or decode the message. Our current release displays a warning message when this happens, and a future release will remove the restriction altogether.

To report a bug:

If you have found a bug that doesn't appear in the above list, please send us a complete description of the problem. Agent users should use the Post | Support Question menu item, and Free Agent users should manually send reports to agent-bugs@forteinc.com.