Aihuxs.122 net.news utzoo!decvax!harpo!ihnss!ihuxs!steffen Thu May 6 13:48:30 1982 Getting started on netnews (I haven't been reading net.news, so I hope this hasn't been already discussed). Whenever anyone asks me how to use netnews I sigh in dispair because I know I will spend 10 minutes explaining how read all the news initially, figure out what groups to subscribe to, and finallow how to add the subscription list to the .newsrc file. After this I often get a look that means "Well thanks, but if it's that complicated I won't bother." Netnews is easy to use once your subscription list is set up, but doing this is a real bother. To solve this, I seek two improvements to the netnews user interface. The first is a "newsgroups" command that lists the basename of the all the news group directories that have been modified in the last 30 days. This will give a list of the active news groups. The second improvement involves adding subscribe/unsubscribe subcommands to readnews, and making the default for -n be "all". Then the new user can enter readnews without any arguments, and just unsubscribe and skip to the next newsgroup by entering U. You would resubscribe to a group by entering S . Joe Steffen Bell Labs, Indian Hill (312) 979-5381 UUCPnet: ucbvax!ihnss!ihuxs!steffen ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.