Wirenet Amiga Internet

Using the new news server

U-Net have just brought their new news server online. This has a greater capacity and is faster, but it does mean that most people will need to make a one off change to allow thier news software to see the articles available for collection.

The address of the server is still news.u-net.com and most software will work exactly as before once it's been reset. The server gives each article in a newsgroup a number, so your newsreader can easily keep track of which was the last article downloaded in each newsgroup and only download the newer articles. When changing servers these numbers change, usually to lower ones so your software may think there are no new articles. The method of dealing this varies between programs, here are instructions for:

Thor

Download ResetNews.lha (1K). Unarchive this file and copy ResetNews.thor to your Thor/Rexx directory, and run it from Thor's Arexx Script menu.

This will result in some duplicate articles, so select Delete Duplicates from Thor's General menu after downloading news. This only needs to be done once.

MicroDot-II

Unfortunately, MicroDot doesn't appear to keep the article number information in a separate file and doesn't have a command to reset the count from within the program so you need to delete and resubscribe to all newsgroups.

  1. If you have any messages you wish to keep, either save them or create a new mail folder and move the messages into this before removing the groups
  2. Choose the newsgroups on the group overview page. (Left click on the first group then press CTRL and left click on the last group)
  3. Click on the Rem Group button and choose Remove groups on the requester that appears
  4. Go to Group Manager and resubscribe to your newsgroups
  5. When you get news now you will get the requestor asking if you want all messages or the last 100
  6. Once you have got the news messages everything should work as normal

If anyone knows how to reset the article counters in MicroDot without deleting the groups, please mail us.

NNTPClient/nntptransfer

NNTPclient uses a completely different method of news collection, known as NEWNEWS. This uses the time of the last collection instead of the article numbers, letting the server do all the work in searching for arcticles to download. As a result, extensive use of this puts a heavy load on the server, making it slower for everyone, so NEWNEWS is no longer supported.

There is an alternative to NNTPClient on Aminet that does the same job but with article numbers, and people using it have reported noticable speed improvements over NNTPClient. The program you need is called NNTP.

Other newsreaders

If your newsreader only works with NEWNEWS, as described in the NNTPClient paragraph you will need to find a more server-friendly method of news collection such as NNTP. Otherwise, check for either a command or menu item to reset the article count (it may be something like "Get All Messages") or remove whatever file the program uses to keep track of the article numbers.

If anyone has any specific recommendations for doing this with other software, please mail us so we can add it to this page.

If you have any questions that aren't covered on the support pages please contact Wirenet Support for assistance.

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This page was last updated on Tuesday 14 September 1999.
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