RumorMill 1.3

News

13 July 2005

A newer beta of an OS X version of RumorMill has been posted on the download page. Please see the readme file for details on this version.

11 July 2005

Andrew Starr has set up a web based news group for discussion newsreaders and servers. He has a separate group for Macintosh based news servers. Here is a link to that newsgroup.

16 July 2003

Well, that copy of 1.3.4 mentioned in our 19 June posting finally came to the end of its run. The host machine lost power about 7 hours and 40 minutes shy of 8 months of continuous service (12 Nov 2002 to 12 July 2003).

19 June 2003

Recently we've had a few reports of RumorMill running continuously for long periods of time. The current record we know of is 221 days (it's still running) for RumorMill 1.3.4 on a 9500 running OS 9.1. Know of an installation that's run longer? Let us know.

25 April 2003

We're looking into the possibility of replacing RumorMill Setup with a web-based interface. Any comments on this concept would be appreciated.

13 Jan 2003

A public beta of RumorMill 1.3.5 (b2) for Mac OS X has been released. While this version is fully functional and stable, it has some limitations. Please see the release notes provided with the application for details. RumorMill 1.3.5b2 can be downloaded from our download page.

7 Nov 2002

Version 1.3.4 of RumorMill was released today. This version is a maintenance release and all users of versions 1.3.x are encouraged to update to this version. A summary of fixes follows.

In RumorMill

• Fixed a bug that broke posting to moderated groups
• Included a missing error string
• Added an "X-Trace" header
• Brought the "NNTP-Posting-Host" header into common usage standards
• Fixed a bug that could cause database compression to run at the wrong time
• Fixed a bug that could cause the log file to not be trimmed to specified length
• Fixed a set of bugs that could cause improper responses to NEWNEWS and related commands from clients
• Add uptime to daily EMails
• Fixed a number of bugs that could cause errors claiming memory was low (in the log file)
• Fixed RumorMill so that it will not POST articles to a downstream server that originally came from another server
• Fixed a bug where the ARTICLE command could return the wrong article

In RumorMill Setup

• Added a diagnostic message for errors encountered during startup
• Fixed a bug that could cause user-group number to be bogus

27 Oct 2002

Version 1.3.4 of RumorMill is now in beta testing. We hope to release this version by mid-November. This version of RumorMill fixes a number of bugs and adds some minor improvements by implementing more of the standard headers for tracing articles.

Version 1.3.5 is in alpha testing. This version provides native OS X compatibility. We hope to release this version by late November or mid-December.

21 May 2002

Swaystairs attempted to send out a survey on the RumorMill-List mailing list. Unfortunately, this went very badly and resulted in list members being showered with unwanted EMail. We would like to apologize to everyone for the problems they encountered. Hopefully the issues involved (several) have been corrected.

As a further step to avoid such problems, the survey that was attempted has been recast as a web page. Please feel free to use this link to respond to the RumorMill survey.

Once again, please accept our apologies for the unwanted EMail.

15 April 2002

RumorMill 1.3.3 was released today. This version is a maintenance release and all users of versions 1.3.x are encouraged to update to this version. A summary of the fixes are listed below

• Fixed a bug in RumorMill Setup that could cause a crash when adding a newsfeed
• Fixed a bug that could result in data loss in the databases
• Fixed a bug where under some circumstances, articles recieved but discarded could incorrectly be sent out as EMail
• Fixed a problem that created an incompatibility with MacSOUP
• Several fixes were made to the handling of the XRef header
• Fixed a bug in the LIST ACTIVE causing explicit group names (no pattern) to fail
• Fixed several bugs related to inserting headers in EMailed articles
• Added "Bytes" to the default overview format; NB: this only works if the user's newsreader actually makes use of the LIST OVERVIEW.FMT command
• Changed Automatic Expiration to only apply to article files and the cancel DB; all other files always receive periodic maintenance processing
• Fixed several minor memory leaks
• Fixed a bug where several commands did not properly handle case independence
• Fixed some inaccurate statistics
• Fixed problems with the "NNTP-Posting-Host" header and incoming EMail
• Improved logging in several unusual situations
• Improved processing of EMail Maps when handling incoming EMail (POP)

30 Jan 2002

RumorMill 1.3.2 was released today. 1.3.2 is primarily a maintenance release, but it also adds two new features. Changes are as follows:

• New
• Now backs up the preferences file every night (to .bk) and weekly (to .wkbk)
• Allows articles to be added to the database from disk files
• Fixed
• A crashing bug when the File->Discard command is used
• Corrected problems with converting databases from the 1.2 format to the 1.3 format.
• A memory leak problem that could occur when articles received were rejected or discarded
• Now correctly times out POP and SMTP connections (wrong timing was being used)
• A bug in the calculation of the expiration date for articles
• Added a byte count to each entry in the "Reject article" file so that the file can be straightforwardly parsed

10 Dec 2001

Added a link from the header to describe how Swaystairs came about and try to clear up some confusion about Swaystairs vs. Stairways.

4 Dec 2001

Rumormill version 1.3.1 was released today. This version corrects a problem that could cause a type 10 crash. It turns out that this bug also exists in version 1.2.x of RumorMill. Users are encouraged to upgrade to version 1.3.1

Last updated 13 Jul 2005