Subject: How do I get a small list of newsgroups

From: Clint Danbury <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 21:23:52 -0700

How do I get the "folders" screen to show me just a few newsgroups ?  At
present my option(s) is(are) to place the cursor on some message which
says "press here to see the list" or something similar; which I do, and
gen appears a list of 845,917 usenet newsgroups.

All I really want to do is read form three or four of them.  I don't want
to see the gargantuan list, repeated each time I open it.  I just want to
see my little closed-minded, biggoted, prejudiced, (and whatever other
upopular adjectives may apply this month) list of a few newsgroups, and
not have to choose this menu which produces a list of twelve zillion
choices, from which I choose another choice, which then produces an\other
waiting period while pine places "-\-/|\-/|".....and so on for about 2
minutes and so on and so on.

I tried the "add" suggestion offered to another poster here earlier, and
pine just tells me that I am already subscribed to that newsgroup.

That's the problem.  I'm subscribed to  all zillion of them.

Is it really that hard to put threee or four names on the screen, and let
me choose the one I want ?

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From: Myron Wayne Jones <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 15:27:26 -0500 (CDT)

If you have access to tin on your system, you can subscrib and 
unsubscribe to newsgroups there.  If I am not mistaken, pine uses the 
same file that tin uses to read the available news groups.  I simply 
unsubscribed to all newsgroups using tin.  In pine, I subscribed to each 
of the ones I wanted individually.  Only those that I am subscribed to 
show up in pine.  When I want to search for a particular group, I use tin 
to accomplish this.  Hope this helps.

- Myron Jones

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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 17:25:21 -0400

On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, Clint Danbury wrote:

> gen appears a list of 845,917 usenet newsgroups. [...]

    You did not say what system -- Un*x, DOS, Windoozy, whatever -- you
are using Pine under, so I will use the example of Un*x.  Pine uses
your .newsrc file.  Mine is quite small -- it has only the newsgroups
to which I am subscribed.  You might try this.  First, change to your
home directory.  THEN, MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR .NEWSRC FILE IN CASE
SOMETHING GOES WRONG.  Next, with a good text editor, simply delete the
entries for all the newsgroups (i.e., nearly all of them) that you
don't want.

    You could search for the names of all the groups that you do want
and move them all to the top of the file and delete everything else
below them.  Be sure to move the entire line in which the name occurs. 
Be aware that Pine will display the newsgroups in the folder collection
in the order in which they appear in the .newsrc file.  After you edit
out the zillion groups you don't want, Pine should show you only the
few groups you do want.

    Editing the .newsrc file by hand should be done with very great
care.  That's why you should make a backup copy first so you can back
out if things get messed up.

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
Home Page:  URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

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From: Clint Danbury <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 17:09:02 -0700

Thanks to one and all for the advice.

The solution was....

		rm .newsrc

Then I added the 4 newsgroups that I wanted, and poof.  El-work-o

Thanks for the advice and insight