NewsRog Tutorial 5: Newsreading Basics

Tutorial 5: Newsreading Basics

Contents:	Subscribing	Unsubscribing	The Group Window
	The Article List	The Article View	Closing Groups
	Summary

Subscribing to Groups

NewsRog maintains a list of subscribed groups. This is a subset of the entire list of groups available from the news server. There might potentially be tens of thousands of news groups available, and the chances are that you are only interested in perhaps 10 or 20 of them. All group management is done from the Group List window. Since NewsRog tracks a great deal of information about groups, it would take too much space to put all the groups from the server in the subscribed list, not to mention that searching for the group you want in a list of 25,000 would quickly lose its novelty.

The default project includes a basic set of newsgroups, but you can add more to build your own customized list. There are several ways to subscribe to newsgroups:

If you have previously been using tin or another newsreader that supports .newsrc files, you can import your old groups by using the Groups/Import .newsrc menu item from the newsgroups list window. This will tell NewsRog to subscribe to all the groups that were found in that file.
If you know the exact name of the groups you wish to subscribe to, you can press the Add Group button and type the group name into the string gadget.
If you wish to search for newsgroups, you can have NewsRog display a list of all groups on the server, or all groups matching a particular pattern. Pressing the Show Groups button will bring up a window that looks like this:

Type in a pattern and pressing the Fetch key will retrieve groups from the server matching that pattern. This pattern is parsed on the server and does not support the full set of features provided by AmigaOS patterns, but an asterisk wildcard may be used.

Deleting Subscribed Groups

To unsubscribe from groups, select the groups you wish to unsubscribe from in the group list and press the Delete button. If you have previously read some of these groups and NewsRog has cached the group headers on your local disk, you will see a prompt like this:

There are several choices available:

Delete OV - This will delete the overview (local disk cache) for the group when the group is deleted. Any information about read and unread articles, cached articles, and so on will be lost.
Keep OV - This will preserve the overview for the groups, although the group will be deleted from this project. This way, you may later add this group to this or another project and the overview information will still be present.
Cancel - This will abort the operation and will not delete any groups.
Ask for Each - This will prompt ask whether to delete or keep the overview for each group in the list to be deleted.

The Group Window

Once you have chosen a group to read from your list of subscribed groups, you can enter the group and start reading articles. You can do this in several ways:

Double click on one of the group names.
Press return when one of the group names is selected.
Press the Read button when one of the group names is selected.

The group reader window for that group will then be opened. As many group windows may be opened at once as you wish, but the screen tends to become cluttered with more than one or two, so it is best to close them when you are done reading a group. The group window looks like this:

This version has been deliberately resized to be small enough to fit in this documentation; in general it works best in a larger size (or smaller fonts, which you can set in MUI preferences). Most of the features of the group window will be explained later in this documentation, but enough basics to read articles are given here.

You can see that the group window has two main areas. On top is the article list, and on the bottom is the article display. The size of each can be adjusted by grabbing the balance bar between them and dragging up or down. Each of these areas will be discussed in the next few sections.

The Article List

The article list has three different modes:

All Articles - In this mode, all articles in all threads are displayed (as long as they match other filter criteria, but that will be explained in a more advances section). For example, this mode might display:

  Lines  Grp  Auth        Repl  Subject
     21    1  Joe Cool    2     Some Subject
     85    1  Joe's Bro   0       Some Subject
     12    1  Piper       0       Some Subject
     40    2  Peter J.    1     Another Subject Entirely
     19    2  Frank Rama  0       Another Subject Entirely

All Threads - In All Threads mode, the article list displays only thread entry points. A thread is a basenote, which is a original article, plus all its followups, which are replies to that article or to other followups. In this mode, the above articles would look like this:
```
  Lines  Grp  Auth        Repl  Subject
     21    1  Joe Cool    2     Some Subject
     40    2  Peter J.    1     Another Subject Entirely
```
One Thread - In One Thread mode, the article list displays only posts that are part of a particular chosen thread. For example, if the first thread titled Some Subject is chosen, the list will display:
```
  Lines  Grp  Auth        Repl  Subject
     21    1  Joe Cool    2     Some Subject
     85    1  Joe's Bro   0       Some Subject
     12    1  Piper       0       Some Subject
```

These modes can be thought of as levels of restriction: in the first, all articles are displayed. In the second, only thread entry points are displayed, and in the third, only articles in a single thread.

To view a particular article, you must be in either All Articles mode or in One Thread mode. Double clicking on the list in either of those modes will fetch the requested article and display it in the article view. Double clicking in All Threads mode will display the articles in the given thread by switching to One Thread mode. You may also press the return key with an entry selected.

To move back "up" to a higher mode, you may either press the button that cycles between these images: , or you may use the arrow buttons: .

Almost every button or gadget in NewsRog also has a keyboard equivalent; look at the MUI help bubbles to see what the keyboard equivalent is.

The Article View

After the article you have selected is fetched from the network (or local cache if available), it is displayed in the lower section of the group window, called the article view. Other features of the article view will be explained elsewhere in this documentation, but for now, the browse buttons are of interest. There are two browse buttons: forward (

), and reverse (

Pressing the forward browse button (or the period/full-stop ".") key will page forward in the article displayed in the article list. When the end of the article is reached, the next article in the present thread will be fetched and displayed. When the end of the thread is reached, the first article in the next thread will be displayed, and so on until the end of the group. Many times, it is possible to browse news using just by pressing the "." key when you are ready to continue reading. The reverse browse button (mapped to the "," key) performs the same function but in reverse. It pages back in the present article, etc.

Closing the Group

To close a group, you can use the close gadget in the upper left corner of the window, or the Group Project/Close menu item. This action will close the group window, saving the current set of headers to a local disk cache so they don't have to be fetched from the network next time.

Summary

By this point in the tutorial you should understand:

The difference between subscribed and unsubscribed newsgroups.
Several ways to subscribe to and unsubscribe from groups.
The basic layout of the group window.
The difference between All Article, All Theads, and One Thread modes.
How to switch the article list between modes.
How to view a selected article
How to browse news forward or backward from the keyboard or with the mouse.
How to close the group window, and what happens when you do.