V550-Newsgroup-Browsing
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Newsgroup Browsing
Newsbin has many great features to maximize your time and results when browsing Usenet Newsgroups. You can be very selective or not selective at all. Newsbin allows you to control the quantity and quality of the posts you retrieve from your News Server.
Subscribing to Newsgroups
Your news server organizes files into topics called "Groups". Each server maintains a list of groups, many of which are common to all news servers. Newsbin is installed with a default mimimal groups listing. To get the actual groups list your server carries, you can open the groups window and click the button "Download Groups List From Server". This will download the current group list from your server. Once the groups list is downloaded, re-opening the groups window will show the updated listing.
Newsbin allows you to group subscribed groups into Topics in the groups listing too. You may organize similar groups (similar content) into groups of groups (GOG or topics) on the Groups Tab. This tab is where you begin browsing your Newsgroups. The display let’s you know when you last updated your groups and shows any filter assigned to your groups. Each group or GOG has a properties dialog from which you can control various settings.
The Headers Database and the Post List
After you subscribe to a group, you can have Newsbin download the headers of the posts in the group into storage on your disk. Newsbin then allows you to view these headers in a tab called a Post List.
The header download process can be done manually or set up to be performed automatically at specified intervals.
When you double click on a group in the Groups tab, you perform a Download Latest and Show Post which opens the Post List for the group. You should note that there two things happening 1) adding new entries to disk from the server and 2) reading entries from disk into the Post list. Each of these can be done separately and often you do just want to Show the Post list or Update your headers.
In the Post List you may sort, search, and filter to browse the headers and select Posts to download. Sort entries by clicking the column headings, Search by entering keywords and regular expressions in the Search text box and filter using the various filter controls.
Controlling the Headers Database content
Newsbin limits the headers it downloads based on a few settings that you can control. These are Download Age and Storage Age. Your database of headers may be set to equal that of your News Service provider or to some subset based on age. These settings may be assigned on a global level (default values are Download age = 30 and Storage age = 200) or overridden at the Group level (including the Group of Groups level). There is also a way to assign download filters in the Newsbin configuration file that limits what headers Newsbin downloads.
Controlling your Post List
Newsbin also limits what you see in the Post list by another setting, Display Age. You may have 200 days of headers (or more) in your database, but you can limit the entries displayed in the Post list for the group by Display Age (default setting is 7 days). The Post list ‘’Load’’ control allow you to scan back through your database of headers as needed. See Post List Tab.
Downloading Files
From a Post list or Search result list you may select files to download. Double click on any item in the list and it will be added to the download tab for processing. Newsbin will download, decode and reassemble the files for you and place the result in your Download Path. There are various controls for managing where files end up after download. There are also various controls to allow you to manage the priority order of files being downloaded. Newsbin automatically manages the download and use of repair files to to all it can to get your the file as submitted by the posting user.
Files download status is tracked in the Download Tab and then either the Files tab or the Failed files tab. The status is also indicated in the Post or Search list.
Detailed documentation is available here
- Downloading Newsgroups - How to download a list of newsgroups supported by your server or servers.
- Downloading Headers - How to download headers from selected newsgroups.
- Downloading Files - How to download files and monitor progress.
