Selecting Newsgroups

The first thing to do when you want to read Usenet News is to select which newsgroup to read. This might seem obvious but there are actually three different method of selecting a newsgroup:

1. Click a link in Internet Explorer that launches Internet News and displays the message in a specific newsgroup. If you spend a lot of time in your web browser, this is an easy method of reading a newsgroup, but it won’t prove useful if you want to continue to keep up with the discussions in that group.
2. In Internet News, open the Newsgroups windows by clicking the Newsgroup (Windows) or open Newsgroups (Macintosh) buttons, select a newsgroup, and click the Go to button. As with the previous method, this is fine for scanning a newsgroup but works badly for regular reading.
3. Select a newsgroup to which you’ve subscribed from your Newsgroup or Favorite Newsgroup drop-down menu. If you want to read a newsgroup regularly, this is the way to go.

But how do you go about subscribing to a newsgroup? God question, and let’s look at that now because although it isn’t something you’ll do often, you should do it when you’re getting started with Internet News.

When you first launch Internet News, it doesn’t know which newsgroups Yahoo Service carries. The first task is to make sure your copy of Internet News knows about all the Newsgroups Yahoo service carries.

1. Make sure internet News is running. As a shortcut, if you have the Windows version of Internet Explorer running, you can either select Read News from the Go menu r from the Mail drop-down menu from the toolbars. In the Macintosh version, click the news button on Internet Explorer’s toolbar.
2. Click the Newsgroup or Open Newsgroup button in the toolbar of the main Internet News window to display the Newsgroups window.
3. If the list if empty (click the All tab in the Windows version or the Show All Newsgroup button in the Mac version), click Reset List if you use the Windows version of Internet Explorer. If you use the Macintosh version, from the new menu choose Download Complete Newsgroup List. Either way, Internet news downloads the list of the many thousands of newsgroups that Yahoo Service carries. It may take several minutes to download the complete list, so be patient. Once the list is downloaded, Internet News displays it in the Newsgroups window.

Once you’ve downloaded the complete list of newsgroups, the time has come to pick a few to which you want to subscribe. You can either scroll through the entire massive list, which could take several years of careful study, or you can use a neat feature built into Internet News. If you have an idea of part of the name of a newsgroup, type it in the Display newsgroups which contain field. As you type, Internet News gradually reduces the list to just those newsgroups whose names contain the characters you’ve typed.

Mark NewsGroups

The first and easiest method of marking messages for download is the Mark Newsgroup command in the Offline menu.

• The first decision to make is if you want to get new messages for all your subscribed newsgroups, or just some of them, as by putting a check mark in the box next to each newsgroup name. If your list of subscribed newsgroups is quite small, that's probably the easiest method.

• The second decision you must make is whether or not you want to download just the headers of the message or the entire message. Downloading just the headers takes much less time, but forces you to go through another selection step to download the messages later on.Downloading entire messages increases the overall download time significantly and uses more disk space but is more efficient use of your time. You might even use the two options differently for different newsgroups. For instance, if you read a newsgroup like rec.humor.funny that doesn't get many messages a day, and those that it does get are generally interesting, it makes sense to download complete messages. However, if you subscribe to a newsgroup that gets hundreds of messages each day, most of which are uninteresting, downloading just headers and taking the extra step later make more sense.

• Finally, if you want to limit the number of messages you download, you can set Internet News to download only messages that have been posted within the past few days. Again, this setting may be most useful with newsgroups that carry lots of messages and where discussions move quickly.

After you've finished marking your selections, click the Download Now button to retrieve your messages. If you want, you can click the Disconnect when download is finished button shown here if you want to hang up your modem automatically after retrieving all the messages.

Newsgroup

OFFLINE NEWSREADING

If you did know that the Windows version of Internet News doesn't post your replies and new messages immediately, as does the Macintosh version, but instead queues them for later delivery. This queuing happens because the Windows version of Internet Newsgroup can act as an offline newsgroups reader, which means that you can connect to any Internet Service Providers, download a batch of messages, disconnect from that ISP, read through the messages, reply to messages, and then reconnect to send your replies.

Offline Newsgroup readers are a good thing, since reading Newsgroups can be rather time-consuming, and if you can do it offline it takes less time (since the messages load quickly from your hard disk, rather than being transmitted over your modem one at a time) and it doesn't tie up your phone line. In addition, if you use a laptop computer, you can download a bunch of messages from Newsgroup and read them on the bus or in a plane. I've found that reading newsgroup is a great way to while away those interminable hours between Australia to United States.

The first step when you want to Use Internet Newsgroup as an offline newsreader is to mark the messages you want to download. There are number of ways you can do this, and you'll probably want to experiment with all of them to see which works for you. I'll tell you more about how to do this offline Newsgroup reader in the next archive.