The first time you run News Rover, a configuration wizard will guide you through a series of screens to collect basic configuration.
This will include basic data such as the name of your news server, as well as setting up your first interest group.
To see your post after it has been sent, you must "refresh" the headers. The easiest way is to move for a second to another group then come right back to your original one.
Your post should now appear to you. (refer below)
All general configuration information is modified by clicking "Configure" on the main menu. From here you access a series of property sheets by clicking the tab at the top of the ensuing screen.
When you first click configure, the Server property sheet tab is selected
The changes that you make in the configuration screens take effect immediately and are stored on your hard disk as soon as you click . Doing so returns you to the primary control screen.
The primary purpose of News Rover is retrieve messages and files from Usenet newsgroups. To do this, News Rover connects through the Internet to a companion program on a remote computer. The newsgroup data, which is stored on the remote computer, is retrieved by the remote program and transmitted to News Rover.
In the vernacular of the Internet, News Rover is called an "NNTP Client" and the remote program is called an "NNTP Server". NNTP, which stands for Network News Transfer Protocol, specifies the syntax of the conversation which takes place to transmit the news. The computer on which the NNTP server program runs is called the "News Server".
Adding News Servers
To add a server address, click 'Add Server' and enter the domain name (or IP address) of the news server. Once you do so, the server you have specified will become the currently selected server.
The server selection screen is also used to correct a server's name, remove a server, and change the currently selected server. To change the current server, click the server name which appears below the phrase Select news server to use for message scans:. Click on the server name to select the current news server. To remove the currently selected news server, click . You will be prompted for confirmation.
To correct the name of the currently selected news server, click the edit server name button. Enter the new server name and click OK or click Cancel to leave the name the way it was.
To specify the server scanning priority, first activate server scanning on the Scanning configuration tab, then use server table listed at the bottom of the screen. You must highlight the server you want to set the scanning priority for, then click the 'Set Scan Priority' button. As the pop-up dialog explains, servers with higher numbers are scanned before servers with lower numbers. This allows you to visit your favorite news servers before less preferred ones are scanned.
General Configuration Options
Miscellaneous options are collected together in the General configuration tab.The field labeled minutes to delay between runs controls how long News Rover will wait before revisiting a newsgroup.
The reason for waiting a while before starting a new scan is that articles trickle into newsgroups continuously throughout the day. As they do, the news server assigns them increasing article ID numbers. News Rover remembers which articles it has retrieved for each newsgroup from each server. It makes no sense to check again for new articles after completing a scan
through the newsgroup. It is more efficient (and responsible) utilization of network bandwidth to wait an hour or so before checking again for new data. Inter run delays as long as 8 hours (480 minutes) are not at all unreasonable.Of course,
if you configure News Rover to scan so many newsgroups, or extremely large groups such as multimedia, a single scan through all of them might take days to complete, in which case the issue of sleeping becomes a moot point.
The field labeled Display newsgroup name in status controls whether News Rover displays the newsgroup it is currently scanning in the status field of the Autoscan control-panel screen. This is normally useful information, but you may want to keep this information private.
The general setup screen also contains a group of radio buttons labeled JPEG picture viewer. This controls whether you want to use the internal picture viewer which is built into News Rover for viewing JPEG files or whether you prefer to use an external viewer such as LviewPro, ACDSee or Vueprint. You view JPEG files when you click on a thumbnail sketch in the picture gallery to see the image in full screen mode, or when you click on a .JPG file when reviewing the file attachments collected for an interest group.
The general configuration field labeled Line wrapping for messages you send controls whether outgoing messages have carriage return characters inserted in them to indicate line breaks.
It is legal to send messages with no line breaks in them except to indicate paragraphs, but there are still mail and news reader programs for which this causes trouble.
Chances are you will want to leave this set to the default values, which is to enable line wrapping and wrap lines at 76 characters, unless this causes some specific problem for somebody you are sending messages to.The field labeled Max. line bandwidth utilization controls whether News Rover attempts to "go full speed" when reading news or mail messages. Normally News Rover does indeed go as fast as it can. If this is appropriate, leave the field set to 100, for 100%.
E-mail Configuration
The E-mail configuration screen contains the information News Rover needs to send and receive personal e-mail messages for you. A comprehensive discussion of electronic mail is available in a separate topic.
News Rover allows you to define multiple E-mail accounts.
Each account can have a separate e-mail address and can
access different SMTP and POP mail servers. At the time that you send a message, you can select which E-mail account is to be used for the message.
Click the Add button to define a new E-mail account.
Advanced Configuration
The advanced configuration page contains some settings which help the News Rover support staff debug the product and deal with unusual situations.
It is advised that you not change these settings unless we ask you to. The safer settings are on the advanced configuration page because they are somewhat obscure and do directly affect the proper functioning of News Rover.
Store undecoded messages stores original undecoded messages in a subdirectory of News Rover's home directory named MESSAGES.
This is only of value for debugging problems decoding or processing messages.
Create log file for split message files is a debugging tool which generate a trace file showing what split message reconstruction is doing.
