"Article not found"

[Feddemaster]

Hey There.

I'm kinda new to Newsgroups n stuff and I thought I knew how it worked,
but lately I get "article not found" a lot. Even with freshly posted nzb's.
I use GrabIt...

Sorry if this is a stupid question but can anyone tell me what the problem might be?

[MultiForce]

What usenet provider do you use?

[RealitY]

If you service is through your ISP they may have low retention...

[zot]

Is this an ISP or a for-pay newsgroup service?

Some ISPs don't carry many binary groups, and those they do carry can have as little as one day retention.

If this is a pay service you are using, then you have not set it up correctly, as they will all have recent NZBs in virtually all groups.

[Feddemaster]

I don't use payservers. I guess by ISP you mean like my internet service provider? It's KPN (dutch)
I don't get the message with all the nzb's.

[fugazi26]

Sounds like its just low retention on your isp's newsserver or they do not carry certain binary groups. What are the dates on the nzbs you are downloading?

[zot]

The exact retention in any particular news group on ISP-owned servers is often erratic and inconsistent, so using NZBs can result in a lot of hit-and-miss.

On a short-retention ISP newsgroup server, you are probably better off fetching headers to get an idea of how long files remain on the server, as well as browsing the headers to see what files are available in each group you want to look at. (it's mainly on long (30 to 100+ day) retention pay-servers that fetching headers becomes too impractical because there are so many files listed; then NZBs become a better choice)

The files you see when you download the headers is what is actually on the servers at the time. NZBs will still be able to get files for a little longer after they are no longer listed in the headers.