Option to download specific messages.

[wundrbee]

How about an option to enter specific messages, separated by a comma, to download. I have a few groups where the moderator went in and deleted all the chit chat and kept the informative articles. There are sometimes 2 or 3 hundred messages that the moderator has deleted in between messages. Yahoogroups will block me out after so many "message does not exist" errors. The abilty to download those specific messages would be very useful.

Tammi U.

[Wilson Logan]

Hi Tammi,

Duly noted. A comma delimited file would be fine.

However... the limit for Yahoo is number of individual requests. So lets say you get 300 individual requests. Normally that'd equal 300 requests for a page of 30 messages so you'd get 9000 in total.

If you start making requests for messages 1 and 2 at a time you will drastically lower the number of messages you can get in one session.

What we really need is an ability to blacklist deleted posts so that the initial request does not land on a deleted message.

e.g.

Lets say message 31 is deleted. So your first request for messages 1 - 30 works fine. Then you request 31 - 60 and it fails. But if you'd requested 32 - 60 it would have worked AND you'd have got 29 messages, not one.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Wilson.

[wundrbee]

What you are describing sounds like the reverse of what I am suggesting, but I still like the idea. The ability to blacklist deleted messages might make PGO run faster (Although it's very, very fast as it is.) than it would trying to download the deleted messages and returning an error.  Or, maybe have pgo skip the deleted messages without trying to download and returning an error - same end result, I think.

Tammi U.
P.S. Speaking of deleted messages.... why does pgo not download some of the messages, saying that the message doesn't exist when it really does?  Different server or format on Yahoo's end?

[Wilson Logan]

Hi Tammi,

PGO Can't 'know' about deleted messages until it actually tries to read them by which time its too late. Now if you were going to give it a list of messages to avoid it could do that.

I'm not sure why it sometimes lists messages as missing when they're really there. If they really are there then I guess it must be an issue with the format.

Are you seeing that much now? I know it used to happen.

Cheers,

Wilson.

[wundrbee]

Yes, I am still seeing the "messages (number) does not exist." Quite a bit, actually. I am subbed to a LOT of cooking, herbal medicine, and art groups. I found it easier to just split the database up into 15 groups at a time (in ABC order) and name it something like yahoogroups01-a when the database gets full, I write down the numbers to start a new database with the same groups, but it would have a different letter, etc.

There's usually anywhere from one to five groups that do this give me this message. I've been trying to see if I can see a pattern of sorts, but the only thing that I notice is that it seems to be a group with a huge amount of messages or that the group is several years old.

Another thing I've noticed is that on a couple of groups, I could go back 100 messages or so, and then let pgo do it's thing - and it works. Most of the time though, it will tell me that messages I've already downloaded don't exist.

Yes, I know I probably raised more questions than I answered. I'll take some notes and post here, if I notice a pattern or anything.

Tammi U.