The program is to allow users of RComp's DialUp Internet to easily swap between news servers
while maintaining the individual separate configuration files - including the record of what
has already been downloaded - for each news server.
It's needed because different servers give different headers, so duplicated news items are
not exact duplicates, and so cannot be dealt with as duplicates by, for example, Pluto.
Also, like me, you might have to PAYG for some restricted newsgroups and download these on
quickfetch to save expense.
I use it to make my main news download via an ntlworld server at zero cost on my ntl dial-up
account, and then occasionally switch to a Pipex server to monitor the Argonet groups which
are not available via ntlworld on a PAYG number as a QuickFetch.
This application conveniently lives inside the NewsHound application directory, and is to be
added to DialUp's Tasks list with the path:
<NewsHound$Dir>.!SetNews
which means it will be run each time an internet connection is made by DialUp.
This program reads Inet$NNTPserver which is set by DialUp from that specified for the selected
account.
It strips off the start and end parts just to leave the ISP part - or, to be more precise, the
bit after the first dot - eg, news.tiscali.co.uk becomes just tiscali or news.freeuk.net ends up
as freeuk on its own, or, if it's an odd one with the name first like text.news.ntlworld.com, it
uses that.
This means that news.ntlworld.com becomes ntlworld, but newscache.cable.ntlworld becomes
cable.
It then looks in NewsHound's Config directory to see if there is a folder called that within
it.
If there is (and only if there is!) it sets the path of NewsHound's configuration files to look
in that folder rather than in Config itself.
Initially, when you create the folder, you must copy into it the Config, dunGroup, Globalrule
and IdHist files.
The dunGroup file should be edited to remove any unwanted or unavailable newsgroups, and the
Config file and Globalrule file can be edited if required.
If you have Jonathan Duddington's Speak module loaded, the abbreviated name of the news server
will (optionally) be spoken.
Download from here (3 KB)
