CHAPTER 12
             USING DISCUSSION AND NEWS GROUPS


Much of the interesting information available on OSFN 
comes in the form of Discussion Groups or on Usenet News 
Groups.

The first, Discussion Groups appear in many different 
places in the OSFN menus and represent questions, answers 
and comments posted in OSFN files by registered OSFN 
users.

The second is similar in concept, but is global in scope, 
and represents the combined inputs of many people 
scattered over the whole Internet.

CURRENTLY THE OSFN IS NOT IMPLEMENTING ACCESS TO USENET.  
WE HOPE IT WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON.

If you SELECT a local OSFN discussion group, you will 
first see the list of articles.  You will see the titles 
given to each article and a sequential number assigned to 
each.

The current article (the one that any command will act on) 
is always marked with "*".  When you enter a discussion 
group the "*" will be set to the first unread article in 
that discussion group.  At the bottom of the article list 
is a short command menu, and a command line.

To read an article you can enter the number next to the 
title or, if you wish, you can read unread articles in 
order by entering "n" (for next article).  After you have 
read an article the system will mark the article with an 
"R" to show that you have read it.

When you leave a discussion group, the system will record 
which articles you have read, and the next time you use 
that discussion group the list of read articles will be 
restored to the state that you left.  Continuing to use 
the "n" command will result in reading only what you have 
not previously read.

When Usenet is implemented, if you SELECT Usenet 
Newsgroups, instead of seeing the article list of a single 
discussion group, you will see the main newsgroup list.  
Each item on this list takes the form of a number and a 
three character abbreviation followed by a ".".

Selecting one of them by entering its number will result 
usually in the display of a second list which breaks that 
topic down into a list of numbered sub-topics.  This 
process may repeat several times.

Eventually, you should get to a numbered list of articles, 
or a note indicating that there are no articles available 
in that group.  When you get to the list of articles, 
operation of the newsreader becomes the same as that 
discussed above with discussion groups.


A great number of additional commands can be used with the 
newsreader.  To see the full list you can enter the "h" 
command at any time.  Some of the more useful commands are 
listed below:

   "t" -- Type out the current article.
   "n" -- read the Next unread article.
   "b" -- Back up and read the previous article.
   "v" -- View the next article.
   "s" -- read the next unread article with the Same
         subject.
   "T" -- Same as "t" without page breaks.
   "N" -- Same as "n" without page breaks.
   "B" -- Same as "b" without page breaks.
   "V" -- same as "v" without page breaks.
   "q" or "x" -- Quit or eXit the newsreader.
   "c" -- Contribute an article.
   "f" -- post a Follow-up to the current article.
   "j" -- Jump to a specified article without reading
           it.
   "=" -- moves you forward one screen in the article
           list.
   "-" -- moves you backward one screen in the
           article list.
   ">" -- Save current article to a file in your work
           directory.
   "k" -- Mark all articles up to and including the
           current article as read.

After trying some of these commands, most of the basic 
operations in scanning through the article list and 
reading articles will become fairly intuitive.  There are 
a few things that should be pointed out.

First, if you want to save any articles to a capture or 
log file with your terminal emulator, you should use the 
"T", "N", "B" or "V" commands rather than the lower case 
equivalent.  This will avoid having page breaks embedded 
in the middle of your captured file.  You may also save an 
article to a file in your work directory with the ">" 
command, and later download it to your machine.

A second point is that if you come in for the first time 
to a long standing discussion group, you may be faced with 
a very long list of unread articles.  You may regard the 
older stuff as now irrelevant, and wish to ignore it 
completely.

In such a case, step through the list using the "=" 
command until the list begins to look interesting.  You 
may even want to sample a few articles by entering the 
corresponding number.  When you get the "*" positioned to 
the point where you want to start regular reading, then 
give the "k" command.  This will mark all prior articles 
as read, and subsequent use of the "n" command will read 
only the later articles.

An alternate approach to cutting off old articles is to 
give an "e" command.  That will position you to the last 
article (i.e. the most recent).  Then step backward 
through the list using the "-" command until the titles, 
and article samples look uninteresting.  At this point 
give the "k" command, and all of the prior articles will 
be marked as read.

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