(This page is intended primarily for club members who want to access our newsgroup (ox.clubs.archery) but don't know how to. I seriously doubt that anyone else will find it interesting. Actually, I doubt even club members will find it interesting, but others won't even find it useful.)
Traditional shortcuts bit:
OUCofA has its own newsgroup, ox.clubs.archery. This is probably the coolest net-related thing I've done for the club (yes, even cooler than colouring in the web pages), so it's a shame it isn't used more. People have previously used the excuse that they don't know how to read newsgroups; with the creation of this page, that excuse is no longer valid.
If e-mail's just like a computer-based version of the postal service, a newsgroup is the electronic equivalent of a noticeboard. Anyone, (almost) anywhere can post a message to the board, and anyone, (almost) anywhere can read whatever messages are up there. Usenet, the generic name for all the newsgroups, is like a vast wall with thousands (I kid ye not - around 70,000 last time I looked) of these noticeboards stuck on it.
The noticeboard metaphor isn't perfect. There isn't just one big store of newsgroups that everyone gets their news from. Instead, try to imagine loads of noticeboard walls dotted around the country - one in London, maybe, one in Oxford, one in Edinburgh... you get the picture. And then imagine this repeated all across the world. Now, when someone pins up a new notice, imagine that a supervisor observes this and quickly sends photocopies to a few other nearby walls. Supervisors there send further copies to other nearby walls, etc. And eventually, the notice that someone pinned up has been propagated around the globe.
Obviously this takes time. Replies made in the USA to articles posted in Britain can occasionally take a week to return. But this doesn't affect our group, because we're all posting to it from and reading it in Oxford.
I said "(almost) anywhere". (A couple of paragraphs ago - pay attention!) You've got to get your news from somewhere, and in Oxford our access is slightly restricted by the people who supply it. For example, you won't be able to get alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen. Not a great loss, I hope you'll agree. Nor do we get furrin groups. On the other hand, the ox.* newsgroups (ie, all the groups beginning with "ox."), including ours, are only available in Oxford. If you've got internet access elsewhere, you'll have to telnet into sable to get at them.
There's loads of software around with which you can read usenet news; so much that I hardly know where to begin. Personally, I use strn, and these instructions are biased towards that program, but some people prefer tin or trn, so I'll try to cover them too. First up, though, since you're reading this from the WWW...
Yes, you can almost certainly read news from the web browser you're using right now. Just select any link to ox.clubs.archery. You should be able to read the last twenty or so articles, and you can also post an article of your own.
However, I don't recommend it. While it's possible to read news this way, it's not a particularly comfortable experience with Lynx (although I believe Netscape is a bit nicer). Only seeing the last twenty-odd articles (if you get the HTMLized version of news - Netscape will connect to the newsserver itself) can be a problem on some high-volume newsgroups (not ours, right enough) where 200-300 posts per day is a common figure. You don't get to follow threads either. Again, no real problem on our group. But if you're going to learn to do it, you might as well do it right. Besides, it's easy to get addicted to newsgroups.
First there was rn, short for "readnews". Actually, I think that's still around on sable. But it was crap. And then some clever chap came up with trn, "threaded read news". It was a godsend for people reading high-volume newsgroups, because they could follow posts and replies in the order in which they were made, down the thread of the discussion. Then came strn, which was only really necessary for people reading several very-high-volume newsgroups, or for those who insist that their software be as customizable as possible.
Nevertheless, I use strn rather than trn, because I think it's got a nicer article selection screen; my instructions will be based on strn. However, trn is almost identical (or should be, since strn was modified from it).
When you first type strn at the sable prompt, you will be asked a question like this:
Newsgroup news.announce.newusers not in .newsrc -- subscribe? [ynYN]You might want to press "y" to this one. There will be 32 very boring messages in it, but if you follow their advice you should never offend anyone on the net.
You will then be asked another similar question. Unless you want to reject tens of thousands of groups individually, you might want to press "N" instead. Watch the list scroll up the screen, and wonder how long it would have taken you to do them one at a time.
Eventually, you will be presented with a message telling you that there is nothing for you to read (unless you said yes to news.announce.newusers, in which case press "n" so you get to the "End of newsgroups" message.) At this point you want to type in "g ox.clubs.archery" ("g" short for "go to"). This will happen:
Newsgroup ox.clubs.archery not in .newsrc -- subscribe? [ynYN]
Press "y".
12 unread articles in ox.clubs.archery -- read now? [ynq]
Yes, that's exactly what you want to do. Press "y".
Unless things have got markedly more exciting since I was last there, you will find yourself looking at some pointless, irrelevant, possibly boring message. More than likely written by me. Features of the screen are:
It may be a very short post, but if it's by someone other than Marcus you will want to press <space> to see the next screenful of text. If you realize that you've moved on when you shouldn't have, "b" will take you back up a page.
If you've reached the bottom of the message, pressing <space> will take you to the next unread one. If you want to move to the next post before you've got to the bottom of the current one, press "n".
If you want to reply to someone's post via e-mail, press "r" (or "R" if you want to include the text that you're replying to). If you want to post a follow-up to the newsgroup, press "f" (or "F" to include the text).
Before you can edit a follow-up message, you will be asked several questions. Press <enter> to ignore the ones about distribution and "prepared file to include", and answer "y" to the "Are you sure?" one. You will then be presented with the text editor of your choice (except the default is emacs, which shouldn't be anybody's choice!) so you can type in a message. Once you've finished scribbling, exit the text editor, making sure the file is saved as ".article". You will be asked one final question ("Send, Edit, Check spelling, Abort?") to which you answer "s".
Those should be all the features you need for our newsgroup. If you've branched out into bigger groups and want to know about certain features of strn that make this easier (including marking loads of articles as read without having to read them), e-mail me and I'll try to help you out. You can also e-mail me for advice if you want to know about exotic features such as ROT13 and getting back stuff you've already read.
Tin looks much nicer than trn and strn, and has the advantage of leaving a list of common commands on-screen at all time. Most of the navigation is done using the arrow keys and enter, so you can figure that out yourself. The most important piece of advice I can give you is to start it (first time at least) *without* notification of new groups, so you don't have to say "No" individually to several thousand. Unfortunately I've forgotten how to do that.
You don't want to be following other people all the time. Occasionally you want to lead. So far, however, I've only told you how to post follow-ups to what other people have written. Now let me introduce you to Pnews. If you've got an announcement to make and you want to start a new thread on the group to make it, type
Note the capitalization, though! If you haven't already found out, sable is case-sensitive when it comes to filenames. Thus Pnews must have a capital P (and every other file I've mentioned must be lowercase).
Actually, there aren't any. But some people insist on e-mailing the entire club rather than using the group. To try to reduce this reprehensible tendency, I will now describe how to make using strn a lot more like e-mailing people.
One problem is that, because they don't read lots of newsgroups, they don't need to use strn every time they log in. And they get bored of checking it all the time when there's never anything in ox.clubs.archery. And they know that nobody else bothers reading it, so any urgent messages have to go by e-mail. Would you be happier if you had a newsgroup equivalent of "You have new mail"? Here's how to do it:
Type
Now every time you log in, trn will be run so that it comes up with how much news you have to read, but will immediately return you to the sable prompt without asking you if you want to read it. Why not "strn -c"? Because it didn't seem to work as well when I tried it.
Isn't pico a nice text editor? Don't you vastly prefer it to emacs? (If you've never used emacs, just trust me that you do.) Wouldn't you rather use it as the editor for posting news, so the experience could be even more like e-mail?
Then type
Again, e-mail me if you'd like to know what other interesting things you can do with environment variables, because none of them are relevant to reading news. And remember sable's wonderful "help" command if you want to waste time learning about Unix.
Well, I hope I've bored you sufficiently now. If you think these instructions aren't clear enough about some point, or if there's an important feature you'd like to see covered, e-mail me. Can't say fairer than that, can I?
Just before I go, I'd like to point out that the offers of help via e-mail only apply to members of OUCofA. Contrary to popular belief, I don't have unlimited free time. Also, Unix isn't my area of expertise: if you're a sysadmin whose /etc/passwd file has become corrupted and you don't have a backup, I'm not going to be able to help you. I only expect simple questions that have simple answers.
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