RiscNews lets you choose from a NNTP overview spool which articles
you want to download from a group by manual selection by article
number, subject, or author and save the list of Message-IDs out
to a file for articles which are to be retrieved.

This application will display output from the NNTP xover command.
At present you will have to manually collect this data by recording
a telnet session to your providers news server on port number 119. The
data file must be set to filetype &0FC for !RiscNews to read it in.

The easiest method of getting the articles at present is to use !TCPIP
KA9Q and the extra articles will be fetched in your next news session.

To do this, save the IDs list to the !TCPIPUser.NNTP directory, with
a filename that corresponds to the abbreviation you have associated
with your news server, with the suffix "Get" added to the leafname.

Examples

Check commands entered to !TCPIP either manually or by !TCPIPUser.AutoExec

1) net> nntp addserver news.demon.co.uk 1800 Dem
   net> nntp kick Dem

   Create !TCPIPUser.NNTP.DemGet listing chosen articles.

2) net> nntp addserver pubnews.demon.co.uk 2700 pub
   net> nntp kick pub

   Create !TCPIPUser.NNTP.pubGet listing chosen articles.

Nothing much will happen if a corresponding DemGroup, pubGroup or
whatever you have in your KA9Q configuration does not exist as well.

Double click on the file tmphdrspf - this has is a small overview
of the newsgroup demon.announce taken while their public access
news server was still available at the beginning of 1996 - and
this will be loaded up with the subject fields showing ready for
you the user to choose individual articles... quite straightforward!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Since writing the above documentation, further development on this
application has been going on, and this version allows display of a
choice subject, from, date or message-id fields, and sorting of
the display by article sequence number in the newsgroup overviewed,
subjects sorted in alphabetical order (optionally ignoring "Re: ") and
listing in order of ascending article size, in bytes or by number lines.

You can select and deselect the whole overview, and invoke the nntp
fetcher program (not supplied) to retrieve chosen articles, which
for the moment are saved as News_* inside !RiscNews. NB. You must have
set the name of your newsserver (default read from !RiscNews.Templates)
before choosing this option. The temporary file holding the list of
selected article is automatically deleted when the fetch has completed.

The nntp task runs in a taskwindow, so you'll need your editor present
for you to watch the display, which could include error messages about
articles that may no longer be found on the news server.

Richard Sargeant
