If you are updating from the alpha version called "DaemonNews", please delete the complete "News" directory
and "config/settings/DaemonNews". You dont absolutely need to download the list of newsgroups again,
you can first rename every server file to "old.
I'm sorry for that, but when i changed the name, i also changed
the attributenames to be more unique, and for being more consistent. unfortunately this is not compatible anymore, but
its also very unlikely, that this will happen again. Even if somebody comes up on me shouting Gossip is his name, i would only
change the name itself but leaving the attributes intact.
I think it was not as annoying as the move from (intel) R3 to R4, and it was an alpha version, very few people were using, so i hope
those few will forgive me :-)
You can now get the list of newsgroups by selecting the server in the list and pressing the
"Get List" button. By entering a string above the list of newsgroups, you can limit the list to
those newsgroups that contain the string.
Subscribe a group by doubleclicking on it.
You are now ready to close the preferences window.
If you have set the preferences to download full articles, the articles are downloaded as well,
not only the header.
While an article is downloaded, a yellow lighning indicates this. If an article is fully on your
harddrive, the paper is no longer broken, and if you select the header, the text of the
article is shown in the lower left corner of the window.
You can also select more than one article for downloading, although doubleclicking doesn't
work for some reason, you will have to press enter to download them.
Another possibility is to select articles and mark them for download. They are downloaded
after selecting "News/Download marked" from the menu. This will be usefull, if you disconnect
your modem after downloading the headers, then mark all the headers you are interested in,
and download them all at once.
Further you can also mark all messages of the selected group as read, so they wont
show up anymore, if you have filtering unread only turned on.
Also add a subject, describing the content of your article in a few words. Below you you
can enter the text of your article.
If you have selected "Post later", you may send the article(s) by chosing "News/Send pending
messages" in the main window.
The softwarepackage may only distributed with all files left together, no files added, changed
or removed from the package.
This software comes AS IS, without any warranty. It is currently in beta state, which means
that it might contain lots of bugs, and it doesn't claim to be complete in any way. In other
words, if it causes anything bad, whatever it is, dont blame me, but write a bugreport.
Please send bugreports, feature requests or any other form of feedback to
Michael Praschl. If you send a bugreport,
you might want to add the (zipped) logfile, that can be found in config/settings/Gossip/.
The homepage of Gossip is at
http://stud3.tuwien.ac.at/~e9525802/gossip/.
Installation
To install the Gossip newsreader, just copy the executable wherever you want.
Settings
Setting your name and email address
After you first started Gossip, you should go to the preferences and enter your
realname and email address, and dont forget to save it.
Adding a server
Then go to the "Subscribe" panel in the prefs and enter your newsserver. If you want to
change login, password and port, select the newsserver, change the settings and press
"Save Serverprefs". You can have as much server as you want, and the preferences are
saved for each server individually.
Group settings
You may also want to set how much headers you want to retrieve, for new groups (where
the article pointer is "-1". To do this, select the newsgroup, set the maximum number of
headers to download (and or the article pointer) and press the save button. Again, those
settings are saved for each group individually.
Reading news
Fetching new headers
To fetch the headers for the newsgroups, select "Download news" from the "News" menu in
the main window. Gossip connects to the servers you are using and downloads the headers
for each subscribed newsgroup. If you have subscribed a new group, it only downloads as
much headers, as you have set in the group-settings. Otherwise it downloads all messages
since the last you have downloaded.
Reading news
To read news, first select the group. The downloaded headers are shown in the big
listview on top of the window, nicely threaded. Left of the headers you can see a small
image. If it shows only a part of paper, the article itself is not yet downloaded, and you have
to doubleclick on the header to download it. You can also select the header and press enter
to download an article.
Filtering
If you have already a lot of articles on your harddrive, you can select "Filter/Unread only",
to only show headers of unread/read messages, or only messages the have/dont have
the body downloaded.
Posting articles
To post a new article to a newsgroup, select the group you want to post to and
select "News/Post new article" from the Menu. To post a follow up (reply) to an article,
select a header, and "News/Post follow up" from the menu.
Composing the new article
The article you want to post, is composed in the newly opened window. If you want to post
the article to more newsgroups, simply add the newsgroups to the Stringedit field, and
seperate them with a comma ",".
Posting the article
To post the article select "Post now" or "Post later from the menu. In both cases, the article
is saved to disk, and if you have selected "post now", sent immediately to the server.
Copyright, Distribution, Warranty, Contact
All the files in this package are copyright by Michael Praschl