Does anyone have any strategies for dealing with Message Base corruption? For me, it always seems to happen with Fidonet Echomail message bases. Most often the Allfix File Announce conference but most recently in FidoNet Sysops.

What I am seeing is this:

Occasionally I'll have a message base where the interactive reader always
sees new messages. But there will be messages that I can't view. For example the last message when opened will show something like 264 of 265. But there
is no 265 displayed.

I've tried packing and purging but those don't seem to help in this
situation. If it's an active message base, when new messages arrive things
seem to repair themselves. But if the base is quieter then it could be a long time before new messges come in.

Is there any other way to deal with issues like this?

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: CaNerDUH BBS (1:134/303)

On 11 Sep 2021, Travis Mehrer said the following...

Occasionally I'll have a message base where the interactive reader always sees new messages. But there will be messages that I can't view. For example the last message when opened will show something like 264 of
265. But there is no 265 displayed.

Do you happen to have anybody in your personal twit list (menu command UF)? If you do, messages addressed to or from anyone on your twit list will be skipped and would behave as you're describing.


Jay

... I got stuck for ages behind an ice-cream truck, bloody sundae drivers!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/09/07 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Northern Realms (1:229/664)

Do you happen to have anybody in your personal twit list (menu command UF)? If you do, messages addressed to or from anyone on your twit list will be skipped and would behave as you're describing.

Thanks Jay. I checked but my twit list is still completely empty. Fortunately for this time, new messages have arrived in the affected echo and the issue
is gone for now. I have had this issue on both Windows and Pi versions of Mystic A46.

I'm just about ready to migrate everything over to A47 so I'll at least be
able to see if it's perhaps something that's been fixed in A47.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: CaNerDUH BBS (1:134/303)

Occasionally I'll have a message base where the interactive reader always sees new messages. But there will be messages that I can't view. For example the last message when opened will show something like 264 of
265. But there is no 265 displayed.

This doesn't mean its corruption (although it could). It could be that the message is marked as a private message or is twit filtered, search filtered, etc.

It could be also be a bug in A46 that was fixed in A47 but I can't remember off the top of my head if something like that was fixed! :)

... There will be a rain dance Friday night, weather permitting!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/08/29 (Windows/64)
* Origin: Sector 7 * Mystic WHQ (1:129/215)

This doesn't mean its corruption (although it could). It could be that

You're right, I suppose in most cases corrupt could likely lead to Mystic being completely unable to read the data files.

the message is marked as a private message or is twit filtered, search filtered, etc.
It could be also be a bug in A46 that was fixed in A47 but I can't remember off the top of my head if something like that was fixed! :)

Without having any real proof, I suspect the last one in this case. My only reasoning being that when new messages were received in an echomail area, the issue I had went away.

At any rate, I'm on A47 now so I'll just have to wait and see if I run into this again.

Thanks!

... The seminar on time travel will be held two weeks ago

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/08/29 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: New Mystic BBS (1:134/303)