Reading news

You can use the built-in newsreader to read newsgroups and post articles. This newsreader includes full support for news: type URLs.

Setup

Before you can use the built-in newsreader, you have to configure it in the Mail/News page of the network settings window.

Required settings

The following fields are required:

Your e-mail address and
your real name.
The NNTP news host that you are going to use, probably this is called "news." followed by the name of your provider.
Only if the news server you use requires authorization, you have to enter your user name and password for this server.

Optional settings

The following fields are optional:

A reply-to address if reactions in e-mail should go to a different address.
The name of the organization you represent when writing news articles, or just a fake name for fun.
Your signature file, the contents of this file is appended to every article you write.

Optionally, you can use an external newsreader instead of the built-in one.

The options sub-page in the settings window contains a few options to customize the newsreader. These options are discussed below.

Starting the newsreader

You can start the newsreader from the Project / Open News menu item, or by entering news: in the URL field. The main news page is displayed.

Probably the most convenient way to read news is to subscribe to one or more newsgroups. This won't cost you any money, it just means adding a newsgroup to the list of groups you are interested in. Then you can easily enter the group from this list.

To subscribe to a newsgroup, enter the name of the group in the field at the bottom of the main news page and click the Subscribe button. Once you are subscribed to one or more groups, these are listed on this page. If you are online, the number of new articles in each group is displayed.

To unsubscribe from a subscribed group, click the unsubscribe link after that group.

Reading a newsgroup

To enter a newsgroup, just click on its name in the main news page. If you like to read a group but don't want to subscribe to it, you can enter its name in the field at the bottom of this page and click the Read button.

When you enter a group, a list of articles in that group is built. You can set a maximum number of articles to be included in this list, or use 0 for this setting to retrieve all new articles in the group.

If you have enabled the split screen option, the window is split in two parts (using frames). The upper section contains the article list, the lower part will be used to display articles.

You have the option to sort the list of articles on their subject. That way followups to an article appear grouped together with the original article in the list.

To read an article, just click on the subject.

Old and new articles

Generally articles remain some time on the news server, and probably you are only interested in new articles, not the old ones you've already read. To have old articles ignored in the future, you can catch up with a newsgroup, this means that all articles in that group are marked as being old. You won't see these articles again when you enter the newsgroup again.

There are two places where you can catch up, with a slightly different result. First, you can click the Catch up link for a group on the main news page. All articles currently in that group will be marked as old (in other words, there will be no new articles left).

Secondly, you can use the Catch up link in the article index of a newsgroup. This will only mark the articles listed in the index as old. If you have set a maximum number of articles, or if you have interrupted the building of the article index, those articles not in the list are not marked. This way you can read a group with many articles in "chunks", each time you enter the group again after catch up you'll see a new bunch of articles.

You cannot undo a catch up operation. You can however unsubscribe and subscribe again to a newsgroup, and all articles will be new again.

Reading articles

To read an article, click on its subject in the article index. The article text will be displayed in the lower part of the window (or in the entire window if you have disabled the split screen option).

By default the only headers shown are From, Subject and Date. If you select long headers, all headers are included in the display.

You can choose between using a normal font or a proportional font for the article text. A normal font might be prettier to read, but any formatting (like tables or "ASCII-art") will be lost.

In case you want to save an article, don't use the normal save source option. Because AWeb converts the article text to HTML, the saved source will contain this HTML that the original article hadn't. Use the Save article link at the bottom instead, it will save the original article text.

Posting an article

To post a new article in a group, click the Post new article link on the group article index. To post a follow-up (reply) to another article, click the Follow-up link at the bottom of the article text.

Either way, the new article form is displayed. You can enter or change the subject, add or remove newsgroup names, and write your article.

If you post a follow-up, the original article is quoted (included in your article). Please spend a few seconds to cut down the quoted text until it only contains the lines that you are actually responding to.

You can customize the quote header that appears above the quoted text.

Netiquette

There are a few rules ("netiquette") that you should obey when posting to newsgroups. Nobody will stop you from breaking these rules, but you will annoy many people if you do.

Don't change the subject for a follow-up, unless it doesn't cover the actual article subject any more.
Don't post the same article to many newsgroups at once.
Don't quote an entire article and only add 1 or 2 lines.
Don't use overly large signatures (more than 3-4 lines).

Privacy aspects

Spammers (senders of unsollicited bulk e-mail, mostly of commercial nature) often use software to scan articles posted in newsgroups for e-mail addresses to which they can send their electronic ads. If you use your real e-mail address in an article you post, it is likely that you will receive spam mails in the future. To protect yourself against this, you have two options:

You can configure a false or modified E-mail address. The scanning software used by spammers will find a false e-mail address, and their spam mail will never reach you. Unfortunately, this has the risk that your e-mails sent with the internal mailer will be rejected by the mail server of the addressee. For protection against spam mails, some mail servers check the address from which e-mail messages are sent, and ignore all mails coming from nonexistent addresses.

A better option is to configure your real E-mail address and enable the spamblock mechanism. If this option is enabled, a random string is inserted in your e-mail address before it is included in the From: and Reply-to: headers of articles you post. To enable human readers of your article to e-mail you directly, a line is inserted in your article saying that this random string should be removed before replying in e-mail.

Replying to an article

If you want to reply to an article, but feel that it isn't appropriate for the public newsgroup, you can e-mail a reply. To do so, click the Reply in e-mail link at the bottom of the article. The internal mailer is started to allow you to write the reply.

Searching for newsgroups

You can search for newsgroup names using the search field at the bottom of the main news page. You can enter a DOS pattern to search with pattern matching, or you can enter a simple string for a normal search.

The first time you use this option, a list of all available newsgroups is downloaded. This list may be very long (many thousands of newsgroups), and can take several minutes to download. For your subsequent searches, the already downloaded list will be used. In order to keep up to date with the news server, AWeb will look for new groups when you use the search option, but not more often than once a day.

The search result is limited to 200 group names. If more groups are found, you should narrow your search.

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