Re: Best newsreader???

From: Vanguard (no_email)
Date: 11/08/04 

Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 12:26:37 -0600

"Adam Membrey" <membreya@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ugSaymXxEHA.1264@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
>I know that opinions will vary, and that's exactly what I'm looking for
>:)
>
> I want to know what newsreaders people are using for these NG's?
>
> I currently use OE6 however I find it to be lacking..not sure what
> it's lacking but I just have a sneaking suspicion that there maybe
> something better out there (even if it's commercial software)
>
> I'm just looking for a newsreader that can use multiple news servers
> and is good for posting. I'm not looking for anything to download
> pictures or files..just posting :)
>
> TIA :D
>

OE6 is a good newsreader. I've seriously tried several others and ended
up back with OE6. I do prefer to bottom post (mostly because of the
time it might take for news servers to sync up) and you can use
OE-QuoteFix to solve many deficiencies in OE6. With Windows XP Service
Pack 2, there are now some registry hacks that can alter the behavior of
OE6, like making it bottom post (so I didn't need OE-Quotefix anymore
although its colorization of indentation levels was the last remaining
feature of it that I liked).

I've tried Thunderbird. Its rule set sucks as bad as OE's. A *LOT* of
configuration of Thunderbird is done within configuration file(s) which
you have to edit manually outside of Thunderbird.

I've tried Forte Agent (the free version since I am only interested in
getting a replacement newsreader having equal cost - which is no cost).
It reminds me of some old Windows 3.1 applications with its clunky user
interface. It is a potent newsreader, however, but its features in the
free version weren't compelling enough to lure me away from OE. Its
users claim that it supports regular expressions (REs) but what they
mean is REs really only supported in searches. You can save a search
but you will have to run it manually, select manually the items it finds
upon which you want to commit an action (delete, move, whatever), and
select an action. Although you can save a search to run manually later,
you cannot assign to it an action so you'll have to remember why you
saved that search. You cannot turn these searches into filters (to
colorize, delete, or perform some action on a matched message). In
fact, my recollection is that Forte's filter suck even worse than OE as
to what criteria you can specify to match on the messages. It does suck
royally that Forte cannot handle multiple news servers. Well, yes, its
does but as a workaround. You have to create separate config files and
edit them to use the different news server and then specify to use that
config file on the command line used to load Forte. That's fine if you
rarely test out using different news servers. That's fine if you don't
mind having to exit Forte and reload it again using a different shortcut
with the proper command-line parameters to use a different config file.
It wasn't fine with me so I dumped Forte.

I've tried Xnews (twice). That is because it does support regular
expressions in its filters. Unfortunately this requires that you edit a
plain-text configuration file. They do have a menu shortcut to open
Notepad showing this text file but you are really outside the program
when making configuration changes). It was the ONLY newsreader that I
have tried that would let me search in ANY header and use regular
expressions so I could specify exactly where to search for a string in
that header. I could search on "!mail2news" being at the end of the
Path header to delete posts from anonymous posters using anonymous
mail-to-news gateways. I don't visit any newsgroups where anonymity is
a requirement, like rape help, whistleblowing, etc. Yes, my IP address
is divulged in my posts (but not my e-mail address) but that won't flood
me with spam, and I believe you should still be held accountable for
what you say (full anonymity where anonymity isn't applicable is used by
trolls, malcontents, or those that think it is cutsy). Most killfiling
works only on the From or Subject headers and those are worthless. A
troll will simply change their From header, and blocking by words in the
Subject leads to lots of false positives. So I'd like to block by
NNTP-Posting-Host, if it exists, Path, and other headers alone or in
combination to block a poster. There is one big problem with this,
however: the overview headers that are returned to the newsreader are
extremely minimal, like only providing From, Subject, and Date. Some
servers only provide this much, some servers provide more headers, but
none provide ALL the headers. When filtering on NNTP-Posting-Host,
Path, X-Originating-IP, or whatever is not in the overview headers,
you're stuck in downloading the whole message so you can get all the
headers. Well, I might've worked on this a bit more but gave up on
Xnews because of flaws in its user interface. Click on a post and the
highlight is instead of a different post. Read a post within a thread
and upon return to that newsgroup the entire thread is gone (unless you
hunt around the option to enable Xnews to reread the newsgroup, or you
use Ctrl+F5 to resync all the threads). I never found a way to mark a
thread to watch it (i.e., no flags). In OE, I like to flag those
threads that I've started or participated in and watch them for around 5
days after my last post in them. I sort the message list so those
watched threads are at the to of the message list. Didn't find a way to
do this in Xnews. Rather than have a 3-pane view, like in OE or
Thunderbird, to show the newsgroups (under the news servers) in a tree
list, the message list, and a preview of a selected message, you first
see the newsgroups list (for only one server at a time). Then when you
pick a newsgroups, you no longer can see the newsgroups list and are
instead looking at a split view for the messages list and preview of the
messages. You can wrangle the multiply opened windows tile them but the
content of the tiles is not enforced by their position. To switch
between servers, you use the tabs at the bottom of the screen but those
tabs won't appear until the first time you visit the news server which
must be performed using the menues. When I opened a newsgroup, there
was a delay before seeing the messages, and when opening the messages
there was sometimes a delay, and there was a delay when refreshing their
threading. Sometimes the delay was something getting downloaded but
often I would miss noticing the status bar at the lower right showing
the download, but sometimes it didn't show any progress and there was no
network traffic so the delay was just Xnews not doing anything
noticeable for a short bit of time. I liked the strong filtering
available by using regular expressions but didn't like the bugs or some
of the behavior of the Xnews interface.

I haven't tried Gravity but then it is an unsupported product.

I thrice downloaded Newsproxy (aka nFilter) but each time its install
would abort with an error saying it wasn't a Win32 application. I've
heard that you can use it as a proxy that provides regular expressions
(so I could use it to provide the regular expressions that Microsoft
never includes). It is also an unsupported product so I really didn't
have much impetus to get it working. 

-- 
_________________________________________________________________
********  Post replies to newsgroup - Share with others  ********
Email: lh_811newsATyahooDOTcom and append "=NEWS=" to Subject.
_________________________________________________________________