I don't understand how the message with an order of 2 was a direct reply to the parent. If this were the case, it would have an order of 1. This 'ord' field is simply a count of references in the header. The other unlikely scenario is that the news server added two references (but as you pointed out, there was only one ref in each message). I will check the code, but as I'm sure you've seen, not a lot can go wrong with counting how many refs are in the header. Somewhere between the count and the insertion into the usenet_article table it must have lost one of the refs.

If you leave that clause out permanently, you will get messages out of synch. This will happen more on busy groups that are propogated to many servers.

I thought long and hard about the best way to handle it, and this method with the ord seemed to be the method that fit most situations. In addition to the ord column, there is the 'seq' column this is simply incremented and the thread id displayed on this order. The 'ord' method makes sure the 'seq' 'makes sense'.

As for the other issues, as you probably realize, there's not much we can do about that I don't think. (Except your suggestion of flagging un-inserted messages for manual insertion). If everybody used a good solid news client we'd be fine