Review of NetNews Offline Volume 2

by: Pauli Porkka


CD Title: Net News Vol 2 Review: Net News Vol 1
NetNews Offline Vol 2 contains about 3 months of news (articles) from the following Usenet and other newsgrups: This totals over 400 megabytes of news..

Overall newsgroups mentioned above contains over 217.000 articles! As you can see it is specifically aimed at Amiga people. For you out there who don't have the ability/resources to keep up with those newsgroups this is a must.

Last messages in the compilation are dated around end of the April 1996 so I guess new volume 3 is about to come containing the news for the past 3 months from there on.

The news reader in the CD is the same old Grn and I haven't changed my mind about it since the review of Net News Vol 1 but since I got fed up with it I started looking for other solutions for reading the messages. All the messages in the CD are in a more or less standard news tree directory structure and thereofre I think all the readers which support uucp can read this. Fine example of this is THOR which supports multiple systems so that if I import the news from the CD to a fresh UUCP 'System' I can still continue with my TCP system with the new news I get every day from the Internet. If you don't know how to make this transition I suggest that you just create new system to Thor from its System config and give the new system type UUCP. Just be carefull here if you don't want all the 217.000 news articles you might want to copy areas you are interested to your harddisk and then point Thor's new Uucp system to this directory you copied the areas into and then use ParseUUCP. Just make sure you have the time, even copying the articles from the CD to your HD will take time and lots of it (ofcourse depending on your individual system). The above mentioned ofcourse works only for Thor but if you have any other Uucp importing and multiple systems supporting news offline reader you can propably use it as easily.

To summarize it, for the people without access to these newsgroups it is a definite must although the articles are almost half a year old. For the prgrammers and others trying to find a solution to specific problem this is life saver and saves you from asking the same questions all over again.


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