But now you've read what you want to read, but you need to ask something, or respond to someone else. How do you do it?
Choose "Post" or "Follow-up" from the Control menu. Both will prompt you for your login name, group to post to, and the subject.
If you selected "Post", then the name and Group fields will be filled in (Changing your name from here will save the changes in the settings file). Just type in a subject and click OK.
If you chose "Follow-Up", the subject field will be filled with "Re: (previous subject)" as well as the other two. If you do not want to make any changes, hit OK.
A new window appears, slightly less than 80 columns wide, with some headers, and a button on the bottom. If you chose "Follow-Up", the contents of the previous article will be there too, each line preceded by '> '.
From here, there are a few important things to keep in mind. You MUST leave at least one blank line between the headers and the body of the text that you write. If you do not, the site will reject your article.
You May change the headers, or add more of your own (such as Keywords: or Followup-To:) but you should know what you are doing before doing this.
If you wish to cross-post, you may add other group names to the "Newsgroups: " header, separated by a comma - NO SPACE.
i.e. "NewsGroups: oberlin,oberlin.test"
So now you can write your article, using all the standard Mac editing routines (Cut, Copy, Paste) In addition, you may insert a text file at the given selection point by choosing "Insert File" from the file menu.
When you are done, click the "Post It" button. It may take a while to post (NNTP's fault, not mine). If you get an alert box telling you that the site has timed out and asking if you wish to give it more time, give it more time. The poor server has to do a lot for your article.
Some sites do not allow posting. If this occurs, MacNews will tell you when you hit the PostIt button.
Also, when composing your article, feel free to go back to the article window, read some news, even open another group. Unless you close the Post window, or disconnect from the newsserver, your Article is safe.
