Posting

Posting is the term used for composing articles and sending them to a newsgroup.  InterNews  provides a Compose window for you to enter the text of your article, and it provides commands to post the article. An article can be an original contribution to the newsgroup or can be a “follow-up”, or response, to an existing article.  

InterNews  articles are part of a large information network called the InterNet that connects many educational, research, and commercial institutions around the world. Your contributions may find their way to all of those places, with your name on them.  

Posting is an important action and should not be taken lightly. Every poster should be aware of a number of issues before posting an article. A few are mentioned here. You should also read the articles in newsgroups news.announce.newusers and news.newusers.questions.  

Netiquette   

There are many conventions and general rules of conduct regarding article posting that have evolved over many years of Usenet activity. You will be more successful in getting your message across if you follow these conventions and rules. To find out what they are, read the articles in newsgroup news.announce.newusers. As a general guideline, do not post an article until you know what a “flame” is and what the symbols :-) mean.  

Where does an article go?

If an article is posted to a newsgroup that starts with the prefix that is the name of your college (eg. dartmouth.), then the article will be visible to all InterNews and Usenet users at your site. If the newsgroup name does not start with the name of your college, it will be visible to all Usenet users around the world. Each participating institution pays for the Usenet service, so your message will represent a cost to each of them. Your name and electronic mail address will be on every article that you post. If it offends someone, or it contains personal information, you may receive some unexpected mail in return. Think twice before posting frivolous articles.  

Take a Test Drive First

If you want to try posting your article just to see how it works, you can post it first to the test group at your site. This group is called dartmouth.test[Ask your system administrator for the name of your test group. It is likely to be the name of your site followed by ".test" (e.g. dartmouth.test).] No one will care what your article says if it goes there.

Moderated Newsgroups

Some newsgroups are “moderated”. All articles submitted to the newsgroup are screened by one person who is designated to be the moderator. This means that you cannot post directly to the newsgroup. InterNews  does not tell you which groups are moderated, but articles in such groups are usually marked at the top or bottom of the text as being moderated.InterNews  allows you to post to any newsgroup. If you do post to a moderated newsgroup, your article will actually be mailed to the moderator. If your article is frivolous, you may incur the wrath of the moderator directly. More likely, your article will be ignored.  

Canceling Articles

You can cancel an article that you posted previously. When you do this, the message is removed from all systems to which it had been distributed. This can cause some confusion because some readers may see the article before you cancel it. The sooner you cancel an article, the less confusion there will be.  

Timing of Articles

When you post an article to a newsgroup that you are currently reading, your article will not appear immediately in the Reading window. Similarly, when you cancel an article, it will still be visible in the Reading window. To see your article, choose the Refresh All Newsgroups command from the Reading menu. You can also set a preference that will refresh newsgroups automatically every time that you post an article. Refreshing only works if your newshost computer has made new article available since you posted. Some host machines make new articles available as soon as they are posted. Others hold new articles for a specified time, such as 30 minutes or 1 hour, before showing them.

What if My Article Never Appears?

If you post an article and it never shows up in the newsgroup(s) you posted it to, consider these facts about the Usenet News system: If you post to a moderated group, the article gets mailed to a person who moderates the group. If the moderator chooses not to post your article, it will never show up. If you post an article to a number of groups and any of them is moderated, the article will get mailed to the moderator of the first moderated group in the list. It will not get posted to the other groups unless that moderator decides to post it for you. This may seem strange, but it is the way thatthe Usenet News works. Since this version of InterNews does not tell you which groups are moderated, you can get this sort of surprise when posting to multiple groups.

To get around this problem, post two copies: one to the moderated group and one to the other groups. There is a good chance that the moderator will not post an article that has already been posted. If you are not sure if the group you are posting to is moderated, save your composition while you compose it so that you have a copy in case you want to post it to another group.

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How to Post an Original Article

Choose New Composition from the Compose menu.  A new Compose window will appear.  The top pane of this window has five controls. The first four are a set of buttons that let you choose between an original article, a follow-up, an original mail message, or a mail reply. If you had selected an article in a Reading window , the follow-up article button will be selected. Otherwise, the original article button will be selected and you cannot change it. The other control is the Post Article button. Click on this when your are ready to send the article. This button is disabled until you actually type something in the lower pane of the Compose window.  

The middle pane of the Compose window is called the header. It contains fields where you can enter the name of the newsgroup that your article will be posted to and the subject of the article. If a Reader window was open with a newsgroup selected, the composing window header pane will have the name of that newsgroup in the Newsgroups: box. You can change the group by editing this name. You can post an article to more than one newsgroup by typing more newsgroup names in the box, separating them with commas. You can specify the subject of the article by typing it in the Subject: box. The middle pane of a Composing window can be scrolled or resized to gain access to other, less frequently used header fields. 

If you have entered a “signature” in the Personal Preferences screen (available through the Edit menu), this signature will appear at the bottom of the composing pane. A signature is used to identify you, your mail address, your organization, and anything else that you would like to appear on all of your postings.

Type the content of your article in the lower pane of the Compose window.  

Press the Post Article button or type command-M. The first time that you post after opening your subscription file, you will be asked for your name and password. You can set a preference that tells InterNews  to remember your password instead of asking for it.

How to Follow-up an Article

Select the article that you want to respond to in a Reader window.  

Select any text that you want to refer to in your follow-up article. This text will be copied to the Compose window automatically, marked with a leading '>' and space, and preceded by an attribution that identifies the poster and id of the message you are responding to.

Choose New Composition from the Compose menu.  A new Compose window will appear that is formatted for your follow-up article. The newsgroup name will be filled in.  The subject line will be filled in, possibly with the prefix “Re:”. If you selected text in the article, lines will appear in the bottom pane describing the message id and poster of the article, and the selected text will appear with a prefix of '>' and a space before each line.

If you have entered a signature in the Composing Preferences screen, this signature will be appear at the bottom of the composing pane. A signature is used to identify you, your mail address, your organization, and anything else that you would like to appear on all of your postings.

Type your response below the indented text. Send as for an original article.  

You can change a follow-up article to an original article by clicking the radio button in the top pane. The subject line will change when you do this.  

How to Cancel an Article

Find the article that you want to cancel and select it.  You can only cancel articles that you yourself posted. In addition, if you posted it from a different newsreading program, you cannot cancel it from InterNews.  

Choose Cancel Article from the Reading menu. The article will be canceled and a copy of it will appear in a new Compose window. If you want to change the article and re-post it, make the changes and post it as for any other article.  

If the article you are canceling is a follow-up, the copy will also be a follow-up. You can change this if you want to repost it as an original article.  

Personalizing Your Article

Quoted Text

A follow-up article often includes text that is quoted from the original article. This text is marked with a '>' and a space to set it off from the text of your article. (Other news posting programs use other conventions for quoted text.) If you break the quoted text up in any way, try to maintain this marking.  

Signature

Every article that you post should have a couple of lines at the bottom for your signature - a description of who and where you are. Look at some other articles for ideas. Read news.announce.newusers for some guidelines. You can store your signature by typing it in the box provided in the Composing Preferences screen (available through the Edit menu).

Optional Headers

The middle pane of the Compose window has more fields for optional header information.  You can see these by scrolling the pane or resizing it with the split bar. You do not need to fill any of these in. They are provided for full Usenet compatibility.  

The Keywords field and the Summary field are used by some newsreaders as search keys and are used by readers to judge whether or not the article is of interest.  nterNews  does not display these fields with the article directly. They are included in the pop-up header for an article.  

The Reply-To field is a place to put your electronic mailing address if it is different than the address that InterNews  generates. When you post an article, InterNews  generates your address in the form of “Jane.Doe@dartmouth.edu”. [When you post an article, InterNews  uses the address that you typed in the authentication dialog.]

The Followup-To field is used to redirect a topic. If you want responses to your article to go to another newsgroup, or to several newsgroups, put the names of those newsgroups in this field. Note: If you put the word “poster” in this field, people responding to your article will be asked to reply directly by mail.

The Organization field identifies the place where you work or study.  You can change it or make it more specific. You can also put this information in the signature of your articles.

Saving Compositions

You can save the contents of a compose window at any time before or after it is sent. If you save it before sending, the file that you save it in will be updated when you send it so that it contains the final version. If you do not save it before closing the window or quitting the program, InterNews  will ask you if you want to save it. After sending, InterNews  will ask you if you want to save it. You can use this feature to keep a simple log of sent articles and mail messages by saving them all in a folder. There are some composing preferences that can be set to modify this behavior.

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Mailing

[Note: if your version of InterNews  does not authenticate your user name, then the following mailing features are not available. To see if it does, check the About InterNews… item of the Apple menu. If the words (No Authentication) appear below the version number, you cannot mail from InterNews.]

You can communicate with other people on the InterNet using a simple electronic mail interface in InterNews. This is not intended to be a full-featured electronic mail program, but gives you the basic means of sending a message in response to an article or for any other reason.

How to Mail a Message

Choose New Composition from the Compose menu. The window that opens will default to an article composing window marked as an original article or a follow-up depending on whether or not an article was selected in a Reading window. To send mail instead of posting an article, click on the appropriate radio button at the top left of the window. If you had previously selected an article in a reader window, you will be able to choose Mail Reply. Otherwise you can only choose Original Mail. A mail reply will automatically be addressed to the sender of the selected article.

Type your message in the bottom pane of the compose window. You can quote text from an article that you want to reply to just as you can with articles. You can use the address “me” to mail something to yourself. If you are addressing multiple recipients, separate the names with commas. Use the optional mail header fields in the upper scrolling pane if you need to. These include keywords, carbon copy, blind carbon copy, and a reply-to field if you want the recipients to reply to a different address than the one generated by InterNews.

Click on the Mail Message button to send the message. You will be asked for your name and password if you have not been asked already. Recipient addresses will be verified. If all is ok, the message will be sent.