Why are USENET articles out of order or missing?
It’s a USENET problem, actually. USENET (another term for newsgroups) and the software it runs on does NOT guarantee message order at all. There is no simple way to do that, given the amount of volume that goes on in USENET, and it constantly growing. Also, not all sites are connected directly to the Internet, and network connections go down anyway, and this effects the order in which articles are propagated. This seems to happen if a connection goes down somewhere for an extended period of time and the newer stuff arrives before the older, larger clumps of spooled articles are sent, so things are more or less current.
