checking out this issue now.

I've spoken to the operations engineer and I have an update.

This is indeed related to issue 2522.

In the internal version of 2522, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, our
operations engineer commented thusly:
>Also, a thought on this is that, a moderator may have to do a mass
>approve for this. I'm not sure on it though. Just a heads up to all
>involved customer-facing parties. 

What I didn't realise, is that he really meant the following (my words):
"In order to import these historical messages to the news server,
we're just going to send them all through the system again as if they
were new messages.  In other words, all mailing list subscribers will
see them as new again, and they will appear in the archives a second
time."

Of course, if I had realized this, I would have said "This way isn't
going to work; we need to find a new way, or not do this at all."

I have asked him to cease his importing activity; however, apparently
the mail queue has a considerable number of messages in it already at
this point.

Please DON'T approve any messages (but you knew that already).  I'm
going to go through the news server to see what is going on there, but
I think I'm going to propose that we simply leave the rest of the
newsgroups as is.

I apologize wholeheartedly for the major inconvenience this has caused
all of you.

Our mailing list / news specialist has let the operations engineer
know how to fix the problem in his scripts.  I have let him know that
he can finish the imports after he fixes the problems in the scripts.

I'm closing this issue.  I'm sure we will be following up with a
post-mortem to all appropriate parties via Louis.

it's over...