The problem here is really with NNTP.
NNTP was not designed in a fashion that makes this a reasonable thing to do. The only way to get this is to send a series of 'GROUP' commands, which are relatively expensive for the server. (For INN, it means going into the group directory, and counting the number of article files there).
For those people who subscribe to over a hundred groups, this would take even longer than a list command.
Over-the-modem users probably wouldn't notice how slow it was, because they're already trying to pump gallons through a straw.
There's another problem... the 'clean' way to do it would be to send a whole series of group commands (not waiting for the answers), and then parsing the response to each in turn. This would not fit into WinVN's state-machine model easily.
Summary: We'd love to do it, but it's not easy.
p.s. I think I saw a post from Wayne Davison (maint. of trn) about a patch he'd made to INN to get around this very problem, but don't know the details. Maybe it'll make it into a future version of the NNTP
spec.
[from Sam Rushing]