Informant

Overview

The Subscriptions Window


Subscribing to a newsgroup

Let's go back to our vast publisher of newspapers. Nobody's going to read every newspaper that that publisher publishes, and neither does anyone want to browse through the publisher's entire listing of papers to get information. No, people want to be able to subscribe to particular newspapers.

The same is true of Usenet; you can subscribe to particular newsgroups, and then you'll only see those particular newsgroups listed in your newsreader. However, there is one important difference between subscriptions to newspapers and subscriptions on Usenet: in the real world, your subscription is managed by somebody else. On Usenet, your subscription is managed by your Usenet newsreader. You don't have to "register" your subscriptions with anybody; your newsreader just keeps a list of newsgroups that you've subscribed to. Usenet subscriptions are like Bookmarks in a web browser; they're managed by your software, not somebody else.

The Subscriptions window exists to let you maintain a list of favorite newsgroups (the newsgroups that you've subscribed to). The top of the window displays a list of newsgroups you're subscribed to; double-click on any one of them to open up a Newsgroup window for that newsgroup.

At the bottom of the window is a list. This is will, if you desire, display a list of all the newsgroups that your news server knows about. It doesn't display that list when the window first opens, because news servers normally store thousands upon thousands of newsgroups, and it takes time to load a list with that many entries.

If you haven't ever used Informant before, Informant won't know which newsgroups your news server knows about. Click on the "Refresh" button to instruct Informant to ask the news server for a list of all newsgroups. If you've already done so, then just double-click on the empty list to load all of the newsgroups in the list.

Because of the way news works, newsgroups are named according to a heirarchical structure (just like street addresses in the US; street numbers on streets, which are in cities, which are in states). Think of Usenet as a whole bunch of variously-sized bins. The biggest bins are the top-level newsgroup bins, like rec (recreation), comp (computer), alt (alternative), news (Usenet), and others. Within each of those bins are smaller bins, such as rec.games (recreational games), comp.sys (computer systems), alt.humor (alternative humor), along with individual newsgroups, like news.test. Within each of the smaller bins are even smaller bins, until eventually you get to newsgroups such as rec.games.design (for games design), alt.humor.best-of-usenet (for humorous articles from around Usenet), and comp.sys.be.help (for BeOS help).

The list of newsgroups displayed in the Subscriptions window is displayed according to that very heirarchy. You'll see one entry for "alt", one entry for "comp", and so forth. Double-click on "alt", and you'll get a list of all of the categories and newsgroups within the "alt" heirarchy (you can tell that an entry is a category if it has a little triangle next to it). And so forth. Once you've found a newsgroup that you'd like to subscribe to, click on it, then click on the "Subscribe" button.

If you found the third paragraph in this section incredibly boring, then you're probably familiar with Usenet, and already know what newsgroups you want to subscribe to. In that case, you probably don't need to drill through the list of newsgroups to find the ones you want. You don't have to; click on the "Subscribe to unlisted group" button, and type the newsgroup you want to subscribe to into the text box that pops up. You will then immediately be subscribed to that newsgroup.

If you want to subscribe to a newsgroup that's been created recently, remember that the list of all newsgroups doesn't refresh itself automatically. You have to click on the "Refresh" button, at which point Informant will connect to your news server, and ask for any new newsgroups that the server has found out about since the last time you refreshed the list. These will be added to the list of newsgroups. Note that you can continue using Informant while Informant checks for new newsgroups.

From the Subscriptions window, you can double-click on any subscribed newsgroup to open a separate window for that newsgroup.


Next Page (the Newsgroup window)

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