Someone decided to prank The Millionaire by creating a fake QWKnet account (DINGUS) on Vertrauen and uploading a bunch of REP packets with downvotes of his messages. The account has been deleted, but the thousands of downvotes did identify some issues in Synchronet's handling of vote "messages", especially in smbutil (maintenance), where valid messages would be purged to make room for the vote messages, which aren't actually messages at all.

I think I've addressed the identified issues, so if you update to a development build (v3.18c), you should be okay, but it might be too late and your message base maintenance may have already deleted a bunch of valid messages from the affected sub-boards (e.g. DOVE-Net Entertainment and Synchronet Discussion). If you really want those old messages restored, it would be best to restore from a backup, if you have one. An alternative would be to reset your pointers on Vertrauen and download them in QWK packets, but that will exclude any messages that were posted from *your* system. Luckily, I fixed the smbutil issue before message base maintenance was run here Sunday night.

I also addressed problems where the total number of messages in sub-boards with votes would be misreported in a couple of places. If you see any others (e.g. reporting 10's of thousands of messages, when in fact its close to 1000 msgs), let me know.

So while I'm happy that people are testing the technical limits of the features I've put in place, unfortunately the test came *after* the v3.18b release.

digital man

Synchronet "Real Fact" #6:
Synchronet version 3 for Linux and FreeBSD development began in 2001.
Norco, CA WX: 71.6øF, 75.0% humidity, 5 mph ENE wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs

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