Talk doesn't come cheap these days. It comes with bugs.
In another apparent breakdown of a Web discussion venue, users of the Deja News Usenet service are finding that message threads are vanishing in some parts of the service.
The often-long-running "threads" that display the messages of discussion participants are no longer visible to searchers of individual messages.
"It used to be that you'd get the entire thread that allowed you to follow the thread from the beginning to the last post in it," wrote one Deja News user in a discussion thread carried by the service.
"Lately, when you click 'Thread' all you get is the particular post you were reading with no thread to follow."
Another user told Wired News that he has experienced "messages lost ... messages late, even talk about [users] complaining about their service being deleted."
"There is a bug in the threading code," David Wilson, Deja News' vice president of product management, confirmed Friday. "We are working on a fix and are going to have it out today.
Wilson said the problem wasn't a scalability issue, but rather a simple, recently introduced bug. "It's a pretty minor problem."
He said that the Deja News proprietary software system is capable of handling over four times its current capacity of approximately 1.5 million users.
The problem of service being deleted reported by one Deja News user likely pertains to a problem experienced Thursday.
"Our user-registration database went down for about three hours, so people couldn't get to accounts to read news and posts," said Wilson. The personalized service, not a prerequisite for using Deja News, will keep track of what users have and haven't read in their favorite discussion areas.
The problem at Deja News doesn't appear to be nearly as severe as a recent service breakdown at Yahoo's discussion area Clubs.
But in the wake of that development and Netscape Netcenter's shutdown of its own communities area, Friday's Deja News breakdown raises the issue of how services can keep up with the free, advertising-supported service of online communities.
Deja News is a Web service for following and managing discussions conducted via the Net and the Web. It provides a Web interface for participating in Internet-wide Usenet discussions, as well as forums hosted by Deja News itself. The site's searchable archive of 45,000 discussion forums -- including Deja News Forums, Deja Communities and Usenet newsgroups -- garners approximately 6 million page views per day.
Deja News provides discussion services to HotBot, which is owned by Wired Digital, the parent company of Wired News.
