FAQ: CompuServe

What names do I use for the news and mail servers?

The simple answer is to use news.compuserve.com for the news server and mail.compuserve.com for the mail server. However, news.compuserve.com may cause some trouble for you, especially if you use Agent in offline mode. See the following topic for a discussion of the problem and its solution.

Why do I get "This article is no longer available" errors?

In addition to the normal reasons for getting this error, there is another problem that only affects CompuServe users. As it turns out, news.compuserve.com is sort of a virtual address, and when you connect to it you get randomly connected to one of six physical servers they have installed to handle the load. These servers are mostly synchronized with each other, but it seems to take several hours for articles to reach all six of them.

This means that if you get headers from one server, go offline and mark them, and then connect to a different server to download them, you may get "Article not available on server" errors for some of the most recent articles.

The solution is to always connect to the same server, so that you're always presented with a consistent set of articles. You can do this by using one of the physical server names listed below, thus bypassing the random-connection mechanism.

Note that this problem primarily affects Agent in offline mode. Now that CompuServe has the servers synchronized to within several hours of each other (and using the same article numbers), you may be able to use news.compuserve.com reliably in online mode. That address is a problem only when you go offline between downloading headers and bodies, and your online browsing style may prevent that from ever happening. If so, you may gain reliability and performance by using news.compuserve.com, since the switching mechanism should connect you to the best available server.

If you decide that you do want to use one of the physical servers, open the Preferences dialog box, go to the System Profile page, and set the News Server field to one of the names below:

dub-news-svc-1.compuserve.com
dub-news-svc-2.compuserve.com
dub-news-svc-3.compuserve.com
dub-news-svc-4.compuserve.com
dub-news-svc-5.compuserve.com
dub-news-svc-6.compuserve.com

Once you've done this, disconnect from the server, select all of the newsgroups you follow, and do an Online | Get All Headers in Selected Groups operation. This will download all of the headers for your groups, without regard for their article numbers, and will delete any that are duplicates of ones you've already downloaded. It will also reset the article-number counters so that you'll be able to properly retrieve new articles in the future.

Why are some newsgroups missing?

If you've been using a CIS newsreader like WinCIM to do your Usenet reading, you may discover that you can't access some of your regular newsgroups through Agent. If this happens, the first thing to do is to make sure you have the very latest newsgroup list from the server. To do this, select the Online | Get New Groups menu option.

If it still doesn't appear, that means the CompuServe server doesn't carry that newsgroup. The CIS readers use a different server than the NNTP servers that Agent (and all other Winsock newsreaders) do, and the two sets of servers don't seem to carry the same newsgroups. You'll have to ask CompuServe to start carrying your newsgroup on their NNTP servers.

Can I just type the name of a missing newsgroup?

The CIS newsreaders allowed you to type in the name of a newsgroup if it didn't appear in the group list. This is because they don't display the names of all available groups, so that is the only mechanism to access some of them.

Because Agent always displays all the newsgroups available on the server (if its copy of the list is up to date; do an Options | Get New Groups if it isn't), there is no facility for manually entering a group name. If it doesn't appear in the list, then the server doesn't carry it.

Which forums carry discussions about Agent?

Our official support area is Section 20 of the Windows Connectivity (GO WINCON) forum. We monitor this regularly, replying to user questions, and upload the most recent versions of Agent and the downloadable FAQs in the library there.

We also monitor the Internet Resources (GO INETRE), Internet New User (GO INETNEW) and NetLauncher Support (GO NLSUPPORT) forums, and respond to user questions there as well. If you want to post a question in one of these forums, it's best to include the word Agent in the Subject line so that we'll be sure to see it.

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