# $ K Posting an Article
You can post an article either as a followup to a previous article, or as a "brand new" article.  Note that often it is preferable to respond to an article via an electronic mail message rather than by another article; see Usenet Etiquette and Mailing a Message.
An article contains a header followed by the text of the article.  Each article is directed to one or more newsgroups by a "Newsgroups:" line in the header.  If you want to send an article to more than one newsgroup, type the names of the newsgroups on the "Newsgroups:" line, separated by commas.  The text of an article is separated from the header by a blank line.
Followup Articles
A followup article has the same "Subject:" line as the article which inspired it.  (The notation "Re:" is added.)  This makes it easier for other Usenet News users browsing the newsgroup to follow the discussion.  Also, a followup article typically selectively quotes the earlier article, again to make the discussion easier to follow.
You start composing a followup article by selecting the Followup Article option of an article window's Respond menu.  (See Respond Menu Commands.)  WinVN creates a posting window.  The header of the article in this window is filled in with information taken from WinVN configuration options and from the header of the referenced article.  (See Configuring WinVN.)  The full text of the referenced article is also included in the posting window, with each line preceded by a ">" to indicate that another article is being quoted.  
Fill in the text of your response.  You should delete irrelevant quoted lines in your followup article.  
New Articles
You start composing a "brand new" article by selecting the New posting option from the Articles menu of a group window.  (See Articles Menu Commands.)  WinVN creates a posting window for your new article.  The "Newsgroup:" line contains the name of the newsgroup of the group window; you can edit this if necessary.  Other information is based on the way you configured WinVN.
You must fill in an appropriate subject for the new article.
Sending the Article
When you have completed composing your article, you can send it to the network or cancel it.  See Posting Menu Commands.  After you have posted the article, you can close the posting window.

# $ K Mailing a Message
You can use WinVN to send an electronic mail message either as a personal reply to the author of an article, or as an independent message.  
A message contains a header followed by the text of the message.  A message is directed to one or more recipients by a "To:" line in the header.  If you want to send a message to more than one person, type the electronic mail addresses of the recipients on the "To:" line, separated by commas.  The text of a message is separated from the header by a blank line.
Reply Messages
A reply message has the same "Subject:" line as the article which inspired it.  (The notation "Re:" is added.)   Also, a reply message typically selectively quotes the article which inspired it, to give some context to the recipient.
You start composing a reply message by selecting the via Mail option of an article window's Respond menu.  See Respond Menu Commands.  WinVN creates a mail window.  The header of the message in this window is filled in with information taken from WinVN configuration options and from the header of the referenced article.  (See Configuring WinVN.)  The full text of the referenced article is also included in this window, with each line preceded by a ">" to indicate that an article is being quoted.  
Fill in the text of your message.  You should delete irrelevant quoted lines. 
New Messages
You start composing a "brand new" message--one that does not reference an article--by selecting the Compose mail message option from the Optionss menu of the main window.  (See Config Menu Commands.)  WinVN creates a mail window for your new article.  Your name and organization are filled in based on the way you configured WinVN.
You must fill in an appropriate subject for the new article on the "Subject:" line, and a recipient on the "To:" line.
Sending the Message
When you have completed composing your message, you can send it or cancel it.  See Mail Menu Commands.  After you have sent the message, you can close the mail window.

# $ Subscribing to Newsgroups
What is "Subscribing"?
"Subscribing" to a newsgroup means telling a news reader that you are interested in tracking, selecting, and viewing articles in that group.  Most news readers support the concept of "subscribing" to newsgroups as a means of simplifying the way that you interact with the news reader.  There are probably over 3000 newsgroups in which you are not interested; if you are not subscribed to these newgroups, a news reader need not bother prompting you with information on these groups.
WinVN also supports the concept of subscribing to a newsgroup, but primarily as a means of providing compatibility with other news readers.  WinVN's windowed, point-and-click interface makes it less necessary for it to resort to the somewhat artificial distinction between newsgroups in which you are interested and newsgroups in which you are not interested.  You can always access any newsgroup simply by scrolling to its name and clicking on it.  
Subscribing to New Newsgroups
When WinVN starts up, it can check the news server to see if any new groups have been created since your last session.  (See Configuring WinVN.)  If WinVN checks and finds that new newsgroups do exist, it displays their names in a scrollable list in a dialog box.  You select the groups to which you want to subscribe by clicking on their names.  When you have finished making your selections, click on the OK button.  Alternatively, you can click on the Cancel button and WinVN will ignore the new newsgroups altogether.
Subscribing to Existing Newsgroups
Newsgroups to which you are subscribed are displayed in black at the top of the main window.  Following these groups are all of the unsubscribed group names, in red and sorted alphabetically.  
You subscribe and unsubscribe to newsgroups by selecting them in the main window and using Group Menu Commands.  Select groups by clicking on their names.  A selected group appears in reverse video (black background).  The Subscribe selected groups, Unsubscribe selected groups, and Move selected groups to Top menu options operate on all currently selected newsgroups.
Subscribing to a newsgroup moves its name to the bottom of the list of subscribed groups in the top portion of the main window.  Unsubscribing to a newsgroup causes it to be moved to its proper alphabetical place in the unsubscribed portion of the main window.

# $ K Marking Articles as Read
KNormally, WinVN keeps track of which articles you have read.  (See Group Window.)  Sometimes, you may want WinVN to think that you have read articles when you have not.  You may have read the articles with another newsreader or with a different copy of WinVN, or you may have been on vacation and want to ignore the articles that accumulated in a newsgroup while you were away.
You can manually mark articles in a group as having been read by double-clicking the right mouse button on an article in the Group Window.  This marks all articles from the beginning of the newsgroup to the cursor as having been read.
To toggle the "read" status of a single article in a group, point the mouse cursor at the article subject and click on the middle mouse button.  You can also hold the shift key down and use the left mouse button.

# $ K Authorizing Yourself to the News Server
Some Usenet news servers require you to present a username and password in order to gain access to certain features.  For instance, you may need a username and password to be able to post to any newsgroup, or to be able to read certain newsgroups.  The process of providing a username and password, and the subsequent checking done by the server, is called "authorizing".  
WinVN supports the AUTHINFO NNTP command for authorization.  You can provide a username and password; see Configure Comm... under Config Menu Commands.  
If you have saved a username as part of your WinVN configuration, when WinVN is launched, it attempts to authorize you with the news server.  If you have saved a password as well, WinVN provides the username and password to the news server without prompting you.  If you have saved a username but have left the password field empty, WinVN brings up the Configure Comm... dialog box to allow you to enter your password before completing authorization.  
If you choose to save your news server password, WinVN encrypts it before recording it in the configuration file.  However, given the availability of WinVN source code, a determined attacker with access to your configuration file could decrypt your password without too much effort.  Therefore, for the best security, force WinVN to always prompt you for the password by never saving the password, as described above.
Note that because WinVN attempts to authorize you to the server only when WinVN is launched, you cannot be authorized the very first time you run WinVN.  You must configure your username, click on "OK & Save", exit WinVN, and restart it.

# $ K Getting a Copy of WinVN
WinVN is distributed via anonymous FTP from the hosts  titan.ksc.nasa.gov  and  ripem.msu.edu.  The definitive version is always on  titan.  Copies of WinVN can often be found at other sites, but they are sometimes badly out-of-date.  (The  ripem  site  tends to lag behind  titan  by a day or so.)
Both source code and binaries for various platforms are distributed.  Sam Rushing's implementation of a generalized Winsock DLL has reduced the previous need to have a number of different versions of WinVN, one for each vendor's networking product.  However, WinVN can still be compiled for several different targets, including Windows NT on Intel and Alpha AXP machines.  Distributions are in the form of .ZIP files; be sure to use binary mode FTP to do the transfer.
As of this writing, WinVN source code distributions have file names starting with WINVNSRC,  binary distributions for Winsock (a Windows networking API supported by a number of TCP/IP vendors) have names starting with WINVN, and binary distributions for DEC Pathworks have names starting with WINVNPWK.  See the FTP sites for other files. 
Here is a sample FTP session.  User-typed entries are in bold.

$ ftp titan.ksc.nasa.gov
ftp: connect to address 128.159.1.1: Host is unreachable
Trying 128.159.4.20...
Connected to titan.ksc.nasa.gov.
220 TITAN.KSC.NASA.GOV MultiNet FTP Server Process ...
Name (titan.ksc.nasa.gov:mrr): anonymous
331 anonymous user ok. Send real ident as password.
Password: fred
230-Guest User FRED logged into DISK$SHARE:[ANONYMOUS] at ...
230 Directory and access restrictions apply
ftp> binary
200 Type I ok.
ftp> cd [.pub.win3.winvn]
250 Connected to DISK$SHARE:[ANONYMOUS.PUB.WIN3.WINVN].
ftp> dir
200 Port 9.250 at Host ww.xx.yy.zz accepted.
150 List started.

DISK$SHARE:[ANONYMOUS.PUB.WIN3.WINVN]

WINVNPWK083_2.ZIP;2       170   8-DEC-1993 19:35 [NASA,DUMOULIN]
WINVNSRC083_2.ZIP;1       657   8-DEC-1993 15:14 [NASA,DUMOULIN]
WINVNSTD083_2.ZIP;1       167   8-DEC-1993 15:15 [NASA,DUMOULIN]
WINVN_DOC.ZIP;1           192  23-FEB-1993 11:33 [NASA,DUMOULIN]
...
ftp> get winvnstd083_2.zip
200 Port 10.196 at Host ww.xx.yy.zz accepted.
150 IMAGE retrieve of DISK$SHARE:[ANONYMOUS.PUB.WIN3.WINVN]WINVN...
226 Transfer completed.  xxxxx (8) bytes transferred.
...
ftp> quit
$ 

$ # K Configuring WinVN
Before you use WinVN to read news, you must give it the information it needs to contact the news server, send electronic mail, and so on.   In addition, you can configure WinVN with personal preferences, such as the colors and fonts it uses, how many article titles should be automatically fetched at once, and so on.  
All configuration commands are accessible from the Config menu of the main window.  See Config Menu Commands.
By default, configuration information is written to the file WINVN.INI in the current directory.  The curious may wish to examine this file with a text editor.  See Invoking WinVN.

$ # K Invoking WinVN
K WinVN is typically invoked by double-clicking on an icon in Program Manager; however, WinVN can be invoked via the File/Run... menu command or by any other mechanism that can be used to start a Windows program.
When WinVN starts, it looks for two files:  WINVN.INIK , which contains configuration and customization information, and NEWSRC.K  By default, WinVN looks in the current directory for these files.  However, there are ways of specifying alternate locations for these files.
WINVN Command Line
You can pass command line arguments to WinVN to tell it where to locate your WINVN.INI and NEWSRC files.  The format of the command line is:
   WINVN  IniFile  NewsrcFile
        or
   WINVN  Path
In the first case, WinVN will take IniFile to be the filename--including path specification--of the initialization file.  If IniFile is just a directory name, WinVN will look for the file named WINVN.INI in that directory.  Similarly, WinVN takes the second argument, NewsrcFile, as a filename for the news history file.  If NewsrcFile is just a directory name, WinVN will look for the file named NEWSRC in that directory.
If, as in the second case, WinVN is run with one argument, WinVN will use it as a directory name for both the WINVN.INI and NEWSRC files.
(Actually, this is a simplified description of how WinVN searches for these files.  For a complete description, curious readers are referred to the source code file ini‑news.c.)
WINVN Environment Variable
Alternatively, you can set an environment variable to tell WinVN where to look for these two files.  Set the environment variable WINVN to the directory in which both the WINVN.INI and NEWSRC files can be found.  For instance:
   SET WINVN=F:\FRED
The WinVN environment variable must be set before windows starts up.  Every DOS shell within Windows maintains its own seperate copy of the environment.  Windows only looks at the environment that existed at startup.  
On a PC LAN, an administrator can add code in the login script to set the WINVN environment variable to the unique location of a user's WINVN.INI file (on a network drive).  For those using multiple news servers, you can have multiple icons from within Windows and they have command line arguments set.
Summary of WinVN's Search for WINVN.INI and NEWSRC
Winvn uses the following search mechanism to find the WINVN.INI file:
          Command line    (e.g.,   n:\winvn\winvn.exe u:\winvn.ini u:\newsrc)
          WINVN Environment variable
          Application startup directory
          Windows Directory
          Windows System Directory
          DOS search path

$ # K Using the Mouse in the Group Window
From the Newsgroup window,  clicking the mouse anywhere on the window while a network operation is in progress will update the information on the screen with the current downloaded information.  Once all the article header information has been downloaded and the Newsgroup window is fully populated, the mouse operations are:

Mouse Left	Mark/Unmark an article for further consideration
Drag Mouse Left	Mark/Unmark multiple articles 
Mouse Double-Click Left	Select article for viewing

Mouse Middle	Toggle the read/unread state of an article
Drag Mouse Middle	Toggle read/unread state of multiple articles
Shift Mouse Left	Same as Mouse Middle

Mouse Right	Reserved for future popup article menu		
Mouse Double-Click Right	Mark all articles above this one as "seen".