From: c.CRepin@ic.ac.UK (Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond, Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond)
Subject: Re: Posting on USENET may take a few days...
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 12:39:28 GMT


>From: news@geovision.gvc.com (News Administrator)
>Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
>Subject: Re: Posting on USENET may take a few days...

In Message-ID: <1992Sep30.020809.20552@geovision.gvc.com>, 
pt@geovision.gvc.com writes:


> c.CRepin@ic.ac.UK (Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond, Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond) writes:
> 
> >In a recent post, you enquire about the time an article takes to get posted.
> Well, not really - more like "somebody, whose post I didn't do a proper
> ``followup-to'', enquired about..."

Did I detect the lack of smiley on this sentence ? I apologise for this
mistake; however please bear with me, due to a number of political
reasons at the centre here, automatic followups aren't possible from
this particular node, and I have to submit any followup by using
the email to usenet gateway at cis.ohio-state.edu . 

> 
> >people who are at the end of branches may have up to 3 days delay in
> >keeping in touch with messages. If a user at the opposite end sends
> 
> Most of this explanation is wrong.  

[ stuff deleted ]

>                                                  What does make a
> difference is:
> 	how often you exchange news with your upstream sites
> 	how often they exchange news with their upstream sites

That's in fact part of what I meant. The more hops there are, the more
likely it is for at least one of the hops to exchange news infrequently
due to costs etc.  In addition, the more hope there are, the more likely
it is for one machine along the line to foobar, thus keeping messages
from being delivered for a day or two. Not everybody has reliable feeds.
Although our site is not at the end of a long feed, there have been
many cases where there was no news for  couple of days. I have the
possibility to go up a couple of hops to see where the problem is, and
more often than not, the news was just not coming-in from the general
UK feed. Add to this the fact that our machine here has been configured
to grab the news only two or three times a day, and delays of 2-3
days aren't uncommon. 
Just send a message to alt.test or misc.test .
Agreed, most sites will send you an email confirmation of receipt
in less than 24 hours. But you will also receive confirmations
(echoes) during the length of the week after your posting.

> 
> Our site polls our feed about 6 times a day, and runs the other
> programs hourly or more often.  Because of this, I've seen responses to
> my postings from across the globe in the same day.  (Mind you, I'm a

Lucky you ! I've had email responses from all around USA in less than
a day due to the fact I'm posting through one of the central hubs, 
namely cis.ohio-state.edu. However the post reaches our site here
in a couple of days. Sometimes faster (24 hours) sometimes slower.

> So in summary, if you're not seeing news for days, don't blame where you
> are, blame how your site is run.

Not necessarily.

-- 
Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond, Digital Comms. Section, Elec. Eng. Department
 Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London SW7 2BT, UK
       Internet/Bitnet: <ocl@ic.ac.uk> - Janet: <ocl@uk.ac.ic>
WARNING: Please send any reply to above addresses, NOT to FROM-field !!!