[fastforward]

Originally posted by Stephan Whelan
I've been using the hack for ages now and it's been working fine.

Saying that (always a but in there somewhere) I recently upgraded to the latest version 20010721 and everything continued to work fine.

Today (after it working for a while) I went in to my database to check the usenet tables as I wanted to make sure it was all setup and optimised (as i've been upgraded since some of the early versions) and found that I was missing a couple of indexes which I added...apart from in usenet_ref table...

msgid and key are supposed to be a Primary Keys, yet I seem to have duplicates in there so cannot add it as a primary key. I'm unclear as to what the table actually does and how having duplicate entries in the msgid and key fields will affect the performance of the news pull script.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

This is not good. It will definately hurt performance during news loads. It won't cause duplicates in the forums though as outer joins used prior to the load prevent this.
Run the following commands:

CREATE TABLE tmp_usenet_ref AS SELECT * FROM usenet_ref;
TRUNCATE TABLE usenet_ref;
ALTER TABLE usenet_ref add PRIMARY KEY (msgid,ref);
INSERT IGNORE INTO usenet_ref select * FROM tmp_usenet_ref;
DROP TABLE tmp_usenet_ref;

PS: The latest version is usenet_gateway_v20010729__201. It looks like I forgot to update the first post in this thread last time. Sorry.