# $ K Usenet News
The Usenet News, or Netnews, system is a kind of distributed bulletin board system run on thousands of computers world-wide.  Users of Usenet News exchange views and information by writing articles, which are then transmitted automatically amoungst the computers in the network.  Once posted, an article can by read by others days, hours, or even minutes later, depending upon their computer's type of network link to Usenet.
Articles are organized by topic area into newsgroups, of which there are currently over 4500.  

# $ K Overview of WinVN
WinVN is a Microsoft Windows and Windows NT-based news reader.  Like other news readers, it can be used to select, view, and write Usenet Newsarticles.  WinVN can also be used to send (but not receive) electronic mail messages.
WinVN offers a more visual approach to Usenet News than most other news readers.  WinVN allows you to easily navigate amoungst newsgroups and articles via its point-and-click interface.
In normal operation, WinVN displays three types of windows:  the main window, which displays a list of all newsgroups; one or more group windows, each of which displays a list of the articles in a newsgroup; and one or more article windows, which each displays an article.  Double-clicking on a newsgroup or article name causes that item to be displayed in a separate window.
When you want to write an article, WinVN displays a posting window for that purpose.  See Posting an Article.  Similarly, when you want to write an electronic mail message, WinVN displays a mail window to accept your text.  See Mailing a Message.
WinVN offers a number of configuration options; see Config Menu Commands.

# $ K History of WinVN
WinVN was originally written at home as an own-time project by me, Mark Riordan, a systems programmer at Michigan State University.  The program and its source code have been placed in the public domain.  WinVN is not a product of MSU or any other institution.  
The name WinVN means "Windowed Visual Newsreader".  The "VN" portion of the name was inspired by the now-obscure Unix newsreader, vn.
Serious development of WinVN began in September 1989.  It continued in fits and starts until roughly Fall 1992, when Sam Rushing (rushing@titan.ksc.nasa.gov), Jim Dumoulin (dumoulin@titan.ksc.nasa.gov) took over development.  Sam and Jim work at the NASA/Kennedy Space Center Information Systems Branch and selected WinVN as a good candidate for future development as part of the Payload Data Management System (PDMS-II) project.  After contacting Mark Riordan, NASA agreed to make extensive enhancements to WinVN, coordinate a public domain Internet development effort to extend its features, and to serve as the overall integrator for future versions of WinVN.  Sam Rushing reworked WinVN to support the emerging Windows TCP/IP Sockets standard (Winsock), revamped the user interface and added support for threading and XOVER (a faster extension to the news transport protocol).  He also ported WinVN to Windows NT.  
Since then, many people, in a truly international effort, have contributed their own time to the success of WinVN.  Certainly by now most of the code in WinVN has been written by persons other than I, though I still contribute occasionally.  See List of Contributors.  Although the NASA contributors work partly on "company time", even their work is done in large part on their own time.
I developed a Macintosh version, but it is no longer in sync with the latest Windows version and is not being distributed (I think!).  The release of a number of good Macintosh newsreaders convinced me long ago to cease development of the Mac version.  
You can correspond with the authors of WinVN via the mailing list winvn@titan.ksc.nasa.gov.  It's best to send your remarks to this mailing list.  However, I can be reached at mrr@ripem.msu.edu or  riordanmr@clvax1.cl.msu.edu.

Mark R.   Lansing, Michigan    July 1994

$ # K License to use WinVN
The authors of WinVN have placed it in the public domain.  This means you can use it free of charge for any purpose you like, with no conditions being placed on its use by us.  The source code is also available free of chargeand licensing requirementsfrom the same places as the executables.  
You have our permission to modify, redistribute, hoard, or even sell WinVN in its executable or source form.  You don't have to pay us anything.  If you do sell WinVN, though, we'd appreciate it if you'd provide your own support.  The support load for WinVN is already quite substantial, and the WinVN developers work as unpaid volunteers (except in the case of supporting their own in-house users).  

$ # K List of Contributors
Here is a partial list of those who have contributed to the development of WinVN.  (We are working on compiling a better list.)
Original Author:
	Mark Riordan	mrr@scss3.cl.msu.edu
Enhancement Author:
	Sam Rushing	rushing@titan.ksc.nasa.gov
Contributing Authors:
	Jim Dumoulin	dumoulin@titan.ksc.nasa.gov
	Mat Bretherton	MBretherton@cmutual.com.au
	Mark Hammond 	MHammond@cmutual.com.au
	Conor Nolan	cnolan@tcd.ie
	John Cooper	jcooper@netcom.com
	Michael Downs	mdowns@eos.arc.nasa.gov
	Michael Finken	finken@conware.de
	Harvey Brydon	brydon@tulsa.dowell.slb.com
	Jody Glasser	TDC!VAX000!GLASSER@tdycont.attmail.com
	Jim Martin	jim@grimaldi.rutgers.edu
	Don Gardener	gardnerd@keystone.ksc.nasa.gov

# $ K Usenet Etiquette ("Netiquette")
The ease of posting Usenet News articles causes many inappropriate articles to be sent to the network.  An article can be inappropriate if it:
	--	Is devoid of useful information or ideas.
	--	Is sent to inappropriate newsgroup(s).
	--	Is really intended for a particular individual, rather than the entire Usenet community.
	--	Contains rude or insulting remarks.
Please compose your articles thoughtfully.  Consider sending an electronic mail message rather than posting an article, if appropriate.  
Be aware of the fact that many sites must pay long-distance telephone charges to receive your article.  Also be aware of the fact that some of the popular newsgroups have tens of thousands of readers.  10,000 people each reading your article for 20 seconds spend a total of 55 hours reading your article.
At the end of most articles there is usually a small blurb called a signature or sig.  This usually comes from a file in the person's login directory and is appended automatically to the message by the news reader.   Some people get carried away with their signature and place complex ASCII drawings or cute sayings at the bottom of their messages.  These signatures bother most people and it is considered poor "netiquette" to have signatures larger than about 4 lines.  You can create a signature file of your own using any Windows Editor and then attach it to WinVN using the option Config Signature File on the Config menu.  Please remember to save your signature file as plain ASCII text, since vendor dependent binary files (such as Microsoft Word files) are not portable across the entire Internet community.
Many new users wish to test their ability to post before they actually say anything of any interest to anyone.  Don't post test type messages to an active newsgroup.  This will interrupt quite a number of people and is considered poor "netiquette".  There are usually a number of "Test" newsgroups (they usually have the word "TEST" in their name) that can be used to verify that posting from your host will be successful.   Some test newsgroups (like ALT.TEST) have automatic E-Mail responding software.  A post to those groups will cause electronic mail from all over the world to be sent back to you as your post gets forwarded from site to site.
The "Newsgroups:"  line in a news header isn't limited to just one group.  If a note makes sense to more than one area you can cross-post it to other newsgroups by just separating the newsgroups with a comma on the Newsgroups line.  It is considered poor "netiquette" to cross-post to more than three or four newsgroups.
When posting new articles to News, please remember that News runs on many different hosts and operating systems.  In fact, since WinVN is one of the first usable News readers for Microsoft Windows, the majority of posts from the Usenet are viewed by people running non-DOS/Windows operating systems.  Inserting graphics or non ASCII text (such as different fonts, underlining, color changes etc.) in an article will appear as unintelligible garbage to almost everyone else. You can use WinVN to send binary attachments along with your post but exercise judgment and don't flood the Usenet with massive binary attachments.
When responding to articles, use the Follow-up Article option instead of the New Post option.  This will maintain a reference link between your message and the article you were reading at the time of your posting.   People reading your message from other "thread based" news readers, like WinVN, will be able to understand how your message fits into the rest of the conversation. WinVN will automatically "quote" the text of the article you were reading (including a unique Message ID that can be used to locate the original posting) and insert it at the beginning of your post.   Intersperse your comments between the quoted text and delete any large quoted sections that do not pertain to your response.  Someone can always find the original text by clicking on the unique Message ID.  Also, use Message ID's when referring to other articles and never refer to another article by it's article number.   Article Numbers are never the same from system to system so only people reading news on your own local system will know to which article you are referring.  
Try to keep your text in a generic format.  Many (if not most) of the people reading Usenet do so from 80 column terminals or from workstations with 80 column terminal windows.  Try to keep your lines of text to less than 80 characters for optimal readability.  If people quote part of your article in a follow-up, each line gets indented a few characters and gets proceeded with a ">".  Thus, standard lines of 75 characters or less are best for later readability.    Also, WinVN allows you to change your viewing font to any font your workstation supports.   Be careful when using proportional style fonts since they allow you to place more characters per line than fixed style fonts.
Most news readers on the Usenet are running on multi-user hosts with system administrators and operating systems that validate logons.  Unfortunately, WinVN runs under MS-DOS which is a single user operating system that doesn't have any concept of a logon.  (WinVN also runs under Windows/NT which does validate logon's.)  Please take special care in configuring the Configure Personal Info option and insure that your name and mailing address are valid.  Since most MS-DOS machines cannot receive Internet mail, don't specify your MS-DOS host as your mail address.  

See Posting an Article and Mailing a Message.

# $ K The NEWSRC File
In order to keep track of your viewing history, WinVN records information about newsgroups in a file named NEWSRC.  This file contains a list of all newsgroups.  For each newsgroup, WinVN records whether it is subscribed and which articles have been seen.
Many Unix-based news readers record this information in a file named .newsrc.  WinVN uses a similar file format to provide compatibility with these programs.  One extension had to be made to the file format to provide features not found in ordinary Unix newsreaders.  WinVN NEWSRC files contain in each line a field of the form
	sbiggest_art_number   
where  biggest_art_number  is the number of the most recent article to appear on the news server.  WinVN uses this information at the beginning of a session to tell you which articles have appeared on the server since your last session.  WinVN does not require this field to be present, so you can transport your Unix-style .newsrc file to your PC as the filename NEWSRC and WinVN should be able to use it without modification.  Transporting a WinVN NEWSRC back to Unix would require a simple script to remove the "s" fields.
See Group Menu  Commands.and Invoking WinVN