3.7 Reading only Unread Articles
If you are an experienced News addict and attempting to read news via a SLIP or other low speed network connection, the most common question you are likely to ask is "Is there any way for WinVN to only fetch the articles I have not yet read?" The answer to this question is YES and NO and the explanation is rather complicated. Unlike many other news readers, WinVN supports "Threading" and that implies that the list of messages you are presented is organized within the context of older messages. If WinVN didn't fetch some of these older articles, or only fetched ones you've never seen, it would be difficult to get any sense of context. Also, WinVN is optimized for high performance on a Local Area Network and this sometimes can make it slower over a lower speed connection.
When you select a newsgroup to view, WinVN initially transfers just the article header information from the server to your workstation. The actual article text is only transferred if you click on the subject line of the article. WinVN fetches these article headers in blocks using a single news command. The concept is that it is more efficient to get a few article subject headers that you don't want than it is to go through each article one by one and determine if the user has seen it before. So there is no easy way for WinVN to only fetch the articles you haven't read, but it can get close if you follow the following procedure each time you read news:
1.
Select a low number for your Article Fetch Limit on the Configure Miscellaneous Menu. This will force a dialog box to be displayed each time you request articles from a newsgroup. One of the options on this box is called UNREAD
2. Each time you read articles from a group, before you exit, use the Mouse Double Click right command to mark the block of all articles above the one you were reading as having been read. This is equivalent to the "Catch-up" feature in other news readers.
3. The next time you select a newsgroup, select the UNREAD option from the Article Fetch Limit dialog box. This will only start transferring news from the server to your workstation that is newer than your last "Catch-up" operation.
WinVN Documentation created by Jim Dumoulin / NASA - Kennedy Space Center.
HyperTexted by Michael Downs / NASA - Kennedy Space Center.