Subject: Re: Listing unsubscribed Newsgroups

From: "Zoli Fekete, keeper of hungarian-faq" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 16:57:15 -0400

The control key you're looking for is right there: 
'^X To Matching Grps', 
which gives you all when pressed on the blank line (of course, it may be 
a bit too cryptic, so some local info provided can help). Starting 
with something like news.newuser.announce (and/or local equivalent) could be 
done by adding an initial .newsrc to each newly created home directory - 
I think you'd need that no matter what news-collection you put in the 
.pinerc, anyway (the collection only has the matching entries from .newsrc)!

 Zoli [email-masked] (note my old full address @bcuxs2 is retired)
"For my assured failures and derelictions, I ask pardon beforehand of my
betters and my equals in my calling." - Rudyard Kipling

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From: Jeff Victor <victoj@kellas>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 13:08:18 -0400

Apology-in-advance if this is covered in the FAQ - I haven't found the 
FAQ yet...

Q: What should "news-collections" be set to for new Pine users?

Context:
We've been running Pine 3.91 here for awhile (THANK YOU for creating and 
updating it - great software, "Just Works", even with NIS+, multiple mail 
servers, and non-standard sendmail config) and recently started running 
NetNews.

I'm trying to decide what their default .pinerc should have for 
"news-collections".  I think the reasonable choices are "News" (list all 
groups) or "Subscribed-Groups" (just list the ones to which they're 
subscribed).

Since these people have never used News on this system before, they won't 
be subscribed to any groups when they start.  So if I start them with 
"Subscribed...", they won't see any, and won't know what to do, and won't 
know the names of the available groups, and will be generally lost 
(after all, they *are* "just" users, and get lost easily...  :-)  )

Starting them off with "News" solves the "lost" problem, but many of them 
will never get out of News "mode" into "Subsc..." mode.  Using it 
regularly this way is very awkward, and I will have many unhappy users. :(

So: I'd like to start them in "Subscribed..." mode, but also have a 
command which lists the available *Unsubscribed* groups.  Best of all:
when you use 'A' to subscribe, and Pine asks "Which newsgroup", have a 
control key which lists them and lets you select one.

Is this available and I missed it?  Is there a better approach to the 
problem?

Thanks.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Victor		   The SageNet `Net Sage'	       [email-masked]
Network Administrator						  518-270-2354
The Sage Colleges				Any opinions detected here are
Troy, New York				probably your imagination running wild.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 14:17:47 -0700 (PDT)

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On Fri, 23 Jun 1995, Jeff Victor wrote:

> "news-collections".

If you set "nntp-server" to the name of your NNTP server and leave
"news-collections" blank, Pine will use an appropriate default for
news-collections.  For a system-wide default, set this in the
/usr/local/lib/pine.conf file.  There should not be any need to create
default .pinerc files, Pine will do that the first time each user runs it.

> I think the reasonable choices are "News" (list all

I'm not sure what you mean here.  The name of a news-collection has
nothing to do with what is subscribed or which newsgroups are listed.
Pine will always list only the groups marked as subscribed in the user's
.newsrc file, regardless of the name of the collection.

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA