Subject: Read news article question

From: Nan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 1995 21:09:57 -0700

How do you set up Pine so that once an article in a news
folder is read, it doesn't show up with the N(new) flag
the next time I open that folder in a new session?  It
would also be nice if the cursor jumped to the next unread
message upon entering the folder.

---

From: "Zoli Fekete, keeper of hungarian-faq" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 07:34:13 -0400

According to the Pine help only the Deleted flag is kept between 
sessions (because of the way .newsrc stores info). Surprisingly, many of 
the groups I read actually show only the unread articles as New - but 
some, like c.m.p lose this information! Any explanation by the wizards?

 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

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 14:50:09 +0100 (BST)

This is because you have a feature turned on (not on by default) called 
"news-approximates-new-status".  What happens is this:

It is quite true that only the "Deleted" status flag can be recorded by 
Pine between sessions.  This gets stored in the normally formatted 
".newsrc" file that is also used by other news reading programs.

Other programs divide articles into only two classes: "Seen" and 
"Unseen".  The list held in the .newsrc file lists the "seen" articles.  
These are not normally included in any list of articles you are shown.

Pine attempts to adopt a strategy more akin to e-mail by dividing 
articles into three classes: deleted ("finished with"); seen and unseen 
("new").  Pine's "deleted" is equivalent to a conventional news reader's 
"seen" in that these articles are not by default included in the list 
shown to you.

Both "seen" and "unseen" articles *are* shown in the list to you.  But 
how can Pine store the three classes using a storage (.newsrc file) 
mechanism that only permits two to be saved?

The answer is by using a bit of intelligent guesswork.

Firstly Pine excludes all the "deleted" articles from its list of all 
articles in a newsgroup.

Without the "news-approximates-new-status" feature set all of these are 
displayed as "New".

But *with* the "news-approximates-new-status" feature set Pine checks for 
the date and time of the most recent article that has been Deleted.  It 
then *assumes* that you have read all articles up to that date and time 
(as you must have had them available to see the one you *did* delete) and 
further assumes that all subsequent articles have arrived since.  The 
former are displayed as "read"; the latter as "new".

This falls down a little if you have read some articles after the last 
one you deleted (perhaps you wanted to keep them visible for a bit 
longer), but is nevertheless a pretty good attempt at guessing.

However...

There is one slight "Gotcha" lurking still.  Our news server used to be
fed using a "normal" NNTP news sending process on our "upstream" site.  
This meant that articles arrived here in pretty much the same order as 
they had arrived at that site, and on the whole were in roughly 
chronological order.

However our feed has now been switched off to some Hyper-Intelligent NNTP 
feeding software called, I believe, "NNTPlink".  This works by attempting 
to send articles currently held in (our upstream feed computer's) memory 
to us in real time.  If an article couldn't be sent it is written to a 
queue file, and real-time transmission attempt the next article.  The 
articles held in the queue file is sent by more conventional means from 
time to time.

In practice this makes for much more efficient news sending, cutting down 
dramatically on disk I/O requirements (or so I hear).  However it does 
have the draw back that if our machine is heavily loaded (and hence slow) 
or down for a while then we are quite likely to receive articles without 
receiving the previous ones (which eventually appear later).

This confuses Pine's guesswork a bit, as delayed articles may be 
presented as "seen" when in fact you haven't seen them!

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/