The KNode manual
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Stephan Johach, Thomas Schütz
KNode is an easy-to-use newsreader.
Table of Contents
List of Tables
List of Examples
KNode is an easy-to-use, convenient newsreader; it is intended to allow even newbies to use a newsreader under KDE, but it also offers advanced features appealing to experienced users. KNode is a online-reader but could work together with a newsserver like leafnode as an offline-reader.
As of version 0.4 KNode complies with all the requirements of the GNKSA.
If you have problems or questions about this program, please contact the mailing list for KDE users (for subscription, seeHomepage of the KDE mailing lists ) or one of the KDE newsgroups:
| comp.windows.x.kde |
| de.comp.os.unix.apps.kde (german) |
If you have found a bug or have suggestions regarding the functionality of KNode please report them via the -> menu.
Please make sure when asking questions in the newsgroups and mailing lists mentioned above that the question you are asking is not answered in this manual.
For those new to reading news and posting articles, the A journey through Usenet chapter is recommended; it is not so much about KNode as how to move about in the Usenet with its help. In general, it is not sufficient to just master a news reader for writing news articles: imagine a car driver who masters his car perfectly but does not know about the traffic rules or signs; do you want to encounter such a driver when out in traffic? So please take your time to learn at least a little about the “traffic rules” of the Usenet; the other participants will thank you.
KNode supports you in many cases with hints and warnings: if you do not simply ignore them you will avoid many beginners' mistakes; but, do not exclusively depend on them either.
Please address suggestions and criticisms at the author or at the responsible translator for your language.
You can find KNode in the Menu under the entry: the menu entry launches the program.
If the entry for KNode can not be found or if KNode does not appear after clicking on the menu entry, read Questions and Answers.
The main window of KNode should now be displayed on your desktop as shown; on the first start, the settings dialogue will be invoked.
KNode after first start
The windows shows the menu bar, the toolbar below and the status pane at the buttom. The area between the toolbar and the status pane is occupied by a three-part window.
There is a folder view, which currently contains only three entries:
| The folder Outbox |
| The folder Drafts |
| The folder Sent |
When KNode is completely and correctly configured, the news servers and the subscribed news groups will appear there.
In the upper section is the article view; it is currently empty and does not show any articles. Directly below the article view is the article window; the body of the currently-selected article appears there. These windows are also blank at the moment, as there are no articles, of course. You should not be concerned, though, as before reading and publishing news some things have to be configured; this will be covered by the following section.
We are now beginning the setting up of KNode. Most settings are not important for daily use, but you should know what settings are possible and what they are for. Some may skip the “Quickstart” chapter but those who prefer a quick start will just glance over the manual anyway. For others, especially those who have not any or much experience with a news reader, this chapter offers the chance to fully perform the configuration, although some things may become clear only later on.
Via -> you will enter the preferences dialogue of KNode. The figure shows the dialogue.
Entering personal information
The dialogue is divided into two parts: in one part there is a treeview, in which the top entry Identity is already highlighted; in the other part is the corresponding input dialogue -- these settings relate to the identity with which you navigate through the newsgroups.
If you have already configured your personal settings in the KDE Control Centre before the first start of KNode, they will be adopted.
In the field Name you enter your name, e.g. Joe Miller or Mary Gordon. This name will later appear in the newsgroups as sender, and can be seen by anyone.
Filling out the field Name is mandatory.
In most newsgroups, it is considered polite and appropriate to appear with one's real name; other newsgroups are less strict about this. But, there are also cases when one would not want to appear with one's real name, e.g. in newsgroups where one would like to (and can) talk about very personal matters without being exposed; these groups mostly do tell you in their Charter that the anonymity of their members is explicitly approved.
For those special cases, KNode offers settings that can be adjusted to each newsgroup individually; further information can be found under Group local Identities.
The input field Organisation is optional and does not have to be filled out. You can enter, e.g., the name of your company or your university if you use KNode there; if you leave this field blank, it will often be filled out later by your Internet service provider.
The email address you enter here will be used as sender in news articles, i.e. as actual address of the author, in conjunction with the real name (set in the field Name).
The field Email Address shows up when someone wants to reply to you by email: the email will be sent to the address entered here. Many newsreaders display the sender address together with the name in the Header of the article.
Filling out the Email Address field is mandatory.
Note that the e-mail address will only be used for replies to you if the field Reply-to Address is not filled out; in this case, the field Email will be ignored for replies and the address given under Reply-to Address will be used.
Reply-to Address offers you the possibility to enter a different address than your sender e-mail address: if someone replies to you by email this address will be displayed as target address in the reply. An example for using Reply-to Address would be that you write the article at the office during the day but want to receive the answer in your home inbox, because your boss co-reads your mail.
Only enter an e-mail address in that field if it actually differs from the field Email Address.
Some news readers deliberately set this to an invalid e-mail address in order to prevent spam mails from being received; what could happen, though, is that a reader sends an e-mail to this invalid address which you will therefore never receive. You should drop a note about this in the signature.
If you enter an email address here every article will be sent to the usenet and to this email address.
If this option is selected, the file specified under Signature File will be used as Signature.
The field Signature File determines the file, the content of which is appended to each of your articles. The field is only enabled if the option Use a signature from file is selected.
The signature file is a simple text file, which should not contain more than four lines; it can, for example, contain a reference to your homepage with the corresponding link, your postal address with your telephone number (which would then be of course visible to the whole world with every article) or just a cool quote. The signature is your brand, so to speak, which will mark all your articles; therefore, your signature should not be designed sloppily or in the long run annoying to others: an old joke that one would have to read over and over again does not foster sympathy or the interest of the other newsgroup subscribers.
You can directly enter the file name of the signature file but it is more convenient to use the button . This opens a file open dialogue and you can conveniently choose the signature file with the mouse. The button enables you, after choosing the file, to edit the signature.
It is not necessary to include a separation line in the signature file as KNode inserts it automatically.
If this option is activated, the signature file is not handled as a text file, but as a program. The signature file will be started as a program and the output will be used as a signature. Through that you'll be able to chose a signature by accident or to use fortune to generate a cool slogan every time.
If this option is selected you can enter the text of the signature directly in the input field below.
Please make sure that in this case also your signature should not contain more than 4 lines. A separation line is not necessary as KNode inserts it automatically.
You can later adapt the identity individually for each of the subscribed groups via the Preferences dialogue, e.g. you can specify an English signature for English groups and a German one for German groups. Apart from the language it is also possible to have context-sensitive signatures, e.g. your favourite recipe in a cooking group or the names of your twelve cats in a cat owner group.
You find more in the section Group local identities.
The next step in the configuration covers the news account.
Now we must tell KNode about where we get the news from or where to send the articles to later on. In the tree view on the right, there is an Accounts entry; click on it with the mouse; then, two sub entries will be opened out. Choose the News entry, because we first want to configure the news account: the list of accounts is still empty.
To create a new account click on . The following dialogue appears:
The New Account dialogue
The Name field can be filled in as you like; the text you enter will later be visible in the folder view. You could, for example, enter the name of your Internet Provider; for our example we enter the name My News Account.
The next field is labelled Server. Unlike the field Name, what you enter here is important. The name of the news server is fixed and you should be able to get it from your Internet service provider; if you do not know the name of the news server, you should get it now: without this information you can not read any news. If your Internet service provider doesn't own a news server you can use a public one (universities often provide public news servers.)
For our example configuration we enter the name news.server.com
If you want to use KNode with a local news server, enter the name localhost
Port, the next field, has already a default value. The Port designates, roughly speaking, a data channel on which the server listens for whether someone wants to retrieve news: it defaults to the value 119, which is applicable in most cases; therefore, we do not change this default for our example.
The time value you enter here is used if you have established a connection to the news server and if, for whatever reason, no data is received from or transmitted to the news server: after the specified time has elapsed KNode will automatically disconnect. This, amongst other things, relieves the server of unnecessary connections which would otherwise reduce its availability for other subscribers; it also makes sure that an automatically-established Internet connection is not held unnecessarily even if no data is being sent or received.
This settings mainly makes sense if one receives and reads news online; for local news servers it is of almost no importance. If this waiting time is set too low, there can be waiting periods if you read a longer article and do not do “anything” for some time: KNode will have cancelled the connection to the server by then (after the time period has elapsed) and has to reestablish it, causing a delay.
If the waiting time is set too high you might waste online time whilst doing nothing (perhaps increasing your phone bill).
If KNode connects to the news server it waits no longer than the time specified here for an answer; if the period is exceeded KNode cancels the connection attempt and you will get an error message stating that the server is not responding.
Depending on the quality of your Internet account and the news server's current load there can be busy periods where KNode cancels the connection; if this happens frequently, you should set this setting to a higher value.
If this setting is selected, KNode additionally requests the available group descriptions; they will be displayed in the Subscribe to Newsgroups dialogue.
There is not a group description for every group, so it is not an error if no group description is shown when subscribing to a group later on.
The option Server requires authentication needs only to be selected if your news server requires a user name and a password when retrieving articles; you can find out if this is the case from your Internet service provider or the server's maintainer.
If you do not know if this setting is necessary forget about selecting it for now: if you encounter an error later on, you can try selecting it then. Otherwise, select this option and enter your user name under User and the associated password under Password.
By now you have completed the setup of your news account. You can confirm and save your settings by clicking on the button: as soon as you have done that, the account will appear in the list by the name that you entered in Name earlier; and, if you have a close look, you will see that the account also appears in the folder view.
Using the button you could get directly to the dialogue for subscribing to news groups; but, we still have more to do so we'll ignore it for now: there are several ways that lead to the goal.
In the Managing multiple news accounts chapter you can learn how to work with multiple news accounts, but first we will stay with this one; in most cases, one account is sufficient.
Please note that some Internet providers only allow retrieving news from their news server if you are connected to the Internet through them.
We will now move on to configuring the email account; in order to do that, click on the Mail entry in the tree view on the left.
After selecting Mail in the tree view, the following Dialogue Box appears.
Setting up the mail account
You will notice this Dialogue Box is very similar to the news account settings Dialogue Box; but why do we need an email account in a newsreader?
Sometimes you need to answer to the author of an article directly, without posting to the newsgroup; for example, when you want to make a very personal comment or want to correct an error. Sometimes an email is more appropriate than a public remark.
That's why KNode provides the possibility to reply by email; if you want to use this feature you must tell KNode how to send emails: you just need to insert the mail server's address. If you have already configured an email account, e.g. with KMail, you can reuse the settings used there.
If this option is active KNode will use the mail program which is configured in the control centre; the other options in this dialogue will then be disabled.
The name (address) of your mail server as provided by your Internet service provider or system administrator; all you have to do here is enter the mail server's name in the Server field.
In our example we entermail.server.de
If you have one you can send your mail via a local mail server; if this is the case local mail server enter localhost in the Server field.
Again, the Port field has a default value; in this case it's port 25. You should not need to change this, unless your ISP has a very exotic configuration and tells you to do so. We do not change this for the example.
This value is important: if you have established a connection with your mail server and there is no data transfer occurring KNode cancels the connection to your mailserver after the specified amount of time has elapsed.
When KNode tries to connect to the mail server it will wait this long for a reply from the server; if this time is exceeded, you will get a error message.
Depending on the quality of your connection and the actual load of your mail server you might get long reply times; if KNode cancels the connection due to this, you should increase the timeout.
Some ISPs only allow you to send email using their mail server after you have checked your mailbox for new mail: this reduces spamming.
For the same reasons, some ISPs will only allow you to send mail using their mailservers if you are online with them or if you are logged in at the mailserver; for example, this is the normal configuration at GMX and isn't supported by KNode or KMail yet.
With the Appearance dialogue you are given the ability to set the colours, the character code and the font size of the text in the article window; the picture below shows the dialogue.
Setting up the Appearance dialogue
If you select this option you can adjust the colour settings of KNode in the list field below; to change a colour setting do a double-click with the mouse button on the list entry to open the KDE colour-selection dialogue.
The colour selection can only be configured after the checkbox has been checked; otherwise, a double-click on the list entries won't do anything.
If the Use custom colours setting is selected KNode won't use colours which have been changed later globally for KDE but will only use the colours defined here instead.
If you select this setting you can adjust the fonts which KNode uses for the display in the list field below; to choose a font do a double-click with the mouse button on the list entry to open the KDE font-selection dialogue.
The font can only be configured after the checkbox has been checked; otherwise, a double click on the list entries won't do anything.
If the setting Use custom fonts is selected KNode won't use later changes to the global font settings for KDE but will use the fonts defined here instead.
Now click on and then on the sub-entry; the figure below shows the dialogue containing the preferences you can configure there.
The General Preferences dialogue
You don't need to change most of these settings, but we will discuss them step-by-step to give you an overview of the possibilities of KNode.
If this box is checked KNode tries to request new articles from the server when selecting a newsgroup. These settings especially make sense when you use KNode together with a local news server: downloading the messages obviously only works when the server is reachable; for a server which is only reachable via an Internet connection, this setting rarely makes sense and should stay deactivated.
If your system isn't set up to establish an Internet connection if necessary, you will get an error message each time you select a newsgroup.
If you want to keep control over when a connection to the server is established, the -> menu option is appropriate.
This sets a restriction on the number articles which are requested from the server while downloading. The value configured here is for each newsgroup separately. If this is set, for instance, to 300 only the 300 newest articles of the newsgroup are requested; other articles will be discarded.
For newsgroups with relatively high traffic you might lose articles if this value is too low; this especially occurs when you've just subscribed to a newsgroup or only occasionally download articles and the traffic for this reason rises above the value specified here.
Articles you have opened in the article window are marked as read after the number of seconds specified here. If you set this value to be relatively high you avoid articles you have just glanced at being marked as read; on the other hand, it can be annoying for relatively short articles, for which you need less time to read than specified: if you browsed too quickly through the articles they would stay unread even though you have read them. Therefore, you should adjust this value to your personal preferences.
Sometimes an article will be posted to more than one group; this is known as crossposting. If you activate this option, those crossposted articles will be marked as read in all the newsgroups to which they were posted if you read it in one newsgroup.
If this option is selected the lines in the article list are scrolled smoothly instead of jerkily.
This setting lets a discussion be displayed completely (over multiple answer levels) if you click on the plus in front of the discussion; if this setting isn't checked, only the immediate answers to the current article are displayed.
Here you can toggle whether the scoring column should be shown in the article view.
Here you can toggle whether the column with the number of lines should be shown in the article view.
Here you can configure how much memory KNode should use for the caching of the headers.
Here you can change some navigation properties of KNode. Normally everything here is switched off, but if you don't like this kind of navigation you can change it.
The keyboard behaviour between KNode and KMail is a bit different; with the Emulate the keyboard behaviour of KMail switch you can activate the same keyboard behaviour as in KMail for KNode.
If the box Switch to next group is checked, KNode automatically switches to the next group if you mark all articles as read.
If Close the current thread is checked, KNode automatically closes a thread if you mark it as read.
If Go to next unread thread is checked, KNode automatically shows the next thread if you mark the the previous thread as read.
To sort the articles you have the possibility to score them. The standard score is 0: a higher score means that the article is interesting; a lower score means it is less interesting.
In the middle of the window you see a big, white area; here you can see your scoring rules. Scoring rules are used by KNode to score the incoming articles automatically; if, for example, a person always posts nonsense you can automatically score the articles of that person down and hide them.
With the buttons below the list of scoring-rules you can , , and a rule. We will skip this feature for now, because it is not essential for the setup of KNode.
You can learn more about scoring; in the chapter Scoring, watching and ignoring.
Normally you only need the functions ignore and watch; this simply shows if a thread is interesting or not. Here you can configure a default score for the ignored threads; choosing the -> menu item will give this score to all the posts in that thread, and will apply that score also to future posts that follow up the thread.
If an article is interesting, it will get a score above 0. Here you can enter the default score for those articles; choosing the -> menu item will give this score to all the posts in that thread, and will apply that score also to future posts that follow up the thread.
You can use the W key to watch a thread or the I key to ignore it.
This screenshot shows the filter settings.
The filter settings
This dialogue shows two lists. The upper list, labelled Filters, shows all defined filters; when you use KNode for the first time, you will only see the predefined filters.
With the buttons , , and you can add new filters or delete filters which are no longer needed; we will skip this feature for now, because it is not essential for the setup of KNode.
You can find more-detailed information about filters in Defining and using filters.
The lower list, labelled Menu, shows the appearance of the -> menu, which you can reach from the menu bar; the order of the filters in the this menu can be configured in this list.
The button shifts the selected filter one position up. Try it: select the second filter and press ; this entry will then go up one position.
The button does the opposite action: select the filter you just shifted one up and press until it reaches its old position.
With the two buttons and you can visually group the filters on the menu. The separators are shown as ==== in the list; in the Menu they show up as some more-appealing horizontal lines. Try adding separator; then, select the separator and remove it by pressing .
Any changes you make here, you can see in -> after closing this dialogue.
In this dialogue you can set how the single header lines are displayed in the article window.
The Customise displayed article headers dialogue
This list shows all the header lines which are to be display in the article window. The identifiers at the left will be displayed alongside the header lines in < > to their right; the header lines are taken from each message, e.g. for From the From header line will be used (indicating who send the message).
Using you can alter the shown identifiers, alter the header line shown by each identifier and change the font settings of the text used. To make things clearer, we'll now simply select the From:<From> entry in the list and open the dialogue for editing the header display by clicking on .
The Header Properties dialogue
The Header selection box shows the entry From: that is the name of the header line for the sender, as present in the article and evaluated by the newsreader. If you drop down the selection box KNode shows a range of other identifiers, which stand all for a certain header lines in the article: for now, we'll leave the From identifier configured; we'll work with this list later, when we add a header line to the display.
This field holds the name you'd like to be later shown in the article window as a label alongside the actual header line text; for example, for the From header line the label From is used. If you leave this field blank, only the content of the header line appears in the article window; this is, for example, the default setting for the Subject header line. We won't change anything here either, for now.
Here you can influence the way the 'Displayed Name' text is displayed; in our case, the Bold attribute is selected for the name From, i.e. the text will be shown in bold letters in the article window. Of course, you can combine different attributes, for example Bold and Underlined.
Here you can influence the way the header text is displayed in the article window; for example, if the Italic entry is selected the sender, e.g. “John Doe <johndoe@doubleguns.com>” will appears in an italic font.
To explain the possibilities of this dialogue to you we're going to add a new header line to the display.
Example 2.1. Show the newsreader used for a post in the article window
This pictures shows the dialogue with the header line X-Newsreader.
The Header Properties dialogue
It would be nice if one could see which newsreader another subscriber uses in the article window; it is actually quite easy to do this because there is a (optional) header line which contains the necessary information.
Drop down the Header selection field and select the X-Newsreader entry from the list.
In the Displayed name field, enter Newsreader.
Now you can select any attribute for the display of the field and its content; next, acknowledge your input with the : the new header line appears now in the list and will later be shown in the article window.
Use the and buttons to arrange the order of the headers in the article window.
The statement that the new header line will be shown in the article window is actually pretty optimistic, because the entry X-Newsreader isn't required for Usenet articles; therefore, not all articles will contain that header line: if the line doesn't exist, the according entry simply won't be shown. You can get more information about headers at http://www.kirchwitz.de/~amk/dni/headerzeilen (german)
If this is active, the headers will be 'beautified' a bit; otherwise, only the plain text is shown.
If this option is active, the text wrapping in the viewer will be automatically corrected.
If this is active empty lines at the end of the article will be automatically hidden.
If this setting is activated, the signature of the sender is displayed in the article window; if it isn't, the signature is suppressed.
Please notice that KNode can display the signature correctly only if it can be separated correctly from the article content in the current article: there are newsreaders which do this separation incorrectly. Two “-” characters followed by a “ ” (space) is correct.
Many participants in the newsgroups give hints on their homepage or say that they have intentionally erroneously specified their Email addresses in the header fields: if you disable displaying the signature, you might lose this information; on the other hand, you might save yourself from reading strange quotes.
If this is active, all text format tags in the message like *bold*, /italic/ and _underline_ are shown directly in the viewer. These text-format tags are an unofficial standard.
To display the quoted text in another size or colour, KNode needs to recognise that it's quoted text. Quoted text is normally marked with a “>” at the beginning of the line, but sometimes there are other characters. In this field you can enter all characters that should mark quoted text.
If this setting is marked, KNode tries to display the contents of possible attachment directly in the window when opening an article; for instance, a picture would be displayed directly below the article text.
Additionally, you have the possibility to save the attachment or open it with the application you have associated with the MIME type of the attachment by using the context menu.
If this box is checked, attachments are opened with the external program which is configured for the MIME type; if there is no such association, a dialogue for saving a file is opened and you can save the attachment to a separate file.
Articles which are sent as Multipart MIME contain the text of the message in multiple formats, for example as raw text and HTML; the newsreader decides which part of the article is displayed. This setting makes it possible for the other formats to be opened as if they were attachments with a mouse click.
If this setting is disabled, alternative contents are not displayed.
When you post articles with KNode the settings in the following dialogue box are used.
The Technical Settings dialogue
If you choose the wrong settings here your articles could be unreadable or not sendable at all, so please be careful with these settings.
Here you can choose the charset used for encoding your articles. Normally this is US-ASCII for English speaking countries, but your charset may differ. The default is the charset used in your global KDE settings, so you should not have to change this.
When you want to post articles in newsgroups with other charsets (e.g. eastern European or Asian) you can set the required charset here.
Here you set the encoding of the characters for the message transfer; you can choose between 8-bit and 7-bit (quoted-printable).
If you choose 8-bit encoding most special characters are transfered correctly; this is, for example, the normal option for the German groups (de.*).
If you choose quoted-printable 8-bit characters (e.g. German umlauts or special characters) are send as encoded 7-bit characters.
In the English newsgroups 7-bit encoding is quite normal.
If this option is active, KNode uses your default charset for replying instead of the charset of the article you're answering on.
When this is active, KNode generates its own Message-IDs for all articles you post.
The Message-ID must be unique worldwide: there would otherwise be collisions between messages with the same Message-ID and the news server would reject the second article because it thinks this article has already been received.
A Message-ID consists of a valid FQDN (Full Qualified Domain Name); this means it looks similar to an email address with an identification before the @ and the domain.
The identification is generated by KNode automatically, but you must provide a valid domain name in Hostname; if you do not have your own domain, you should not activate this option — let the newsserver generate a Message-ID for you.
Example 2.2. Message-ID
An example for a valid domain would be: kde.org; a Message-ID generated with this domain would look like:
934lek9934@kde.org
An unique identification is only guaranteed if you have your own domain. Even when you do not use KNode for generating your Message-IDs there may be collisions when you are using a local newsserver; for example, leafnode generates a Message-ID which it derives from the local hostname.
You can get more information about this and how to own a free domain at http://www.qad.org/faq/faq-messageid.html.
Here you enter the Hostname of your computer; this is used to generate the Message-ID. If you do not have your own domain you should not activate this option — let the newsserver generate a Message-ID for you. Using the example above this would be: kde.org.
Here you can enter X-Headers which are not provided by KNode; for example, X-No-Archive: yes, which can be used to prevent your articles from being archived by archive services such as Google.
X-Headers are experimental headers, which are not included in the standard for Internet-Messages; they are, for example, used for extended information transfer. To prevent collisions with later standard headers, they have a “X-” prefix.
When this option is checked KNode does not include the corresponding line in the Header before posting.
This header is used for identification of the newsreader the article was written in; apart from statistical reasons, this allows non-standard newsreaders to be identified. You should not activate this option — KNode has no need to hide.
The Composer Settings dialogue
Here you can set the column number at which KNode wraps the line; also, you can deactivate the automatic word-wrapping completely.
It is recommended to use no more than 76 characters even if you are able to display more: many Usenet users use text-based newsreaders which can not display more than 80 characters and it is difficult to read your articles in such a newsreader if you increase this value — this would reduce the probability of your articles being read at all.
When you write a new article or a followup, your signature is appended automatically if you have configured one in ->+Identity.
When you write a followup, KNode inserts an introduction phrase before the quoted original text. You can put arbitrary text here; you can also use the variables which KNode extracts from the original article, e.g. the name of the author or the date the article was written.
The following variable are available:
%NAMEThe name of the original author;
%DATEThe date on which the original article was written;
%EMAILThe original author's email address;
%MSIDThe Message-ID of the original article;
%GROUPThe name of the newsgroup the article comes from.
Keep this short, because this introductory line appears in every followup: a long introductory line can be as repelling as a long signature.
Example 2.3. An example introductory line
On %DATE %NAME wrote in %MSIDLet us assume the original article was written by Konqui on Saturday the 17th of June at 17:42:32 - 0500. The article has the Message-ID <8igdg5.3vvijgt.3@lizard.physos.com>. KNode will then insert the following introductionary line.
On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 17:42:32 +0200 Konqui wrote in
<8igdg5.3vvijgt.3@lizard.physos.com>:When this is checked, the quoted text is wrapped at the correct border value; hence, every new line will be at the correct quoting level.
When this is activated not only the text of the original message, but also the signature of the author, is quoted in a reply.
Quoting a signature is unnecessary and is often considered impolite.
Normally the cursor will appear below the whole message when answering; with this option turned on the cursor appears below the introduction phrase.
This is especially helpful if you quote an article and wish to write between the quoted lines from top to bottom.
You can define an external editor here which is opened by selecting -> in the Composer window.
When Start external editor automatically is checked the external editor is opened directly.
Notice the %f after the name of the editor: this is a variable for the filename of the article you want to edit; do not delete this — you will get an error message when opening the external editor if you do.
If you have problems with starting your external editor, the reason may be that the editor starting in "the background"; this is called forking: KNode only notices the sub-process started and has finished, and thinks you have quit the editor. The editor gvim is an example for this; you can disable the forking of gvim with the commandline switch -f. It is recommended that you refer to the documentation of your editor you are experiencing this problem.
If you want to use gvim in Specify Editor enter the following:
gvim -f %f
Here you can configure the behaviour of the spell checker.
If this is checked a known word-root with an unknown affix will be automatically accepted as a new word.
Here you can toggle if two known words that run together to form an unknown word should be treated as an error or not.)
Here you can tell KNode which encoding should be used for spell checking; for English text this should normally be US-ASCII.
Here you can configure KNode for signing articles with GnuPG or PGP. Your GnuPG/PGP ID will be built automatically from your configured name and email address; it is identical to the from line in the header of the article.
If this option is active you only need to type the passphrase for your private key once; KNode will remember your passphrase until you close KNode again.
If this option is activated KNode will show the signed message in an extra window for confirmation before changing it in the editor.
If you are using public newsgroups (on Usenet) you can safely ignore this option as it would not be useful to encrypt messages sent to Usenet; this option may, however, be useful in private newsgroups on private networks where encryption is desired.
The dialogue below shows the settings for the article cleanup; these settings are used to keep the number of articles on your local harddisk to a reasonable number. KNode administrates the articles in memory so there can be some decrease in speed if you have to many articles lying around; most of the time it makes no sense to keep articles for a very long time. Services like Google and Altavista make archiving unnecessary.
KNode isn't an offline reader, so all of the configuration refers to the headers which are managed by KNode; if you are running a local news server, such as leafnode, you should refer to its documentation to handle expiring the articles on the server — KNode cannot do this for you.
The cleanup settings
When this option is active all subscribed groups are checked for old articles in the time interval set here; the old articles will then be deleted.
You can force this check by selecting ->
Here you can configure how often subscribed groups should be checked for old articles and how often those articles should be deleted; this option only has an effect when Expire old articles automatically is selected.
Read articles are deleted by the next cleanup if they are older than this value; KNode uses the creation date for this.
Unread articles are deleted by the next cleanup if they are older than this value; KNode uses the creation date for this.
It may happen that you'll see a header in KNode but the article is not available on the server; if this option is set, those articles will automatically deleted in KNode.
This selection forces a thread to be deleted only if all articles contained in it fulfil the delete conditions; this means that a thread will not be deleted until the last article in the thread should be deleted.
This prevents old articles in a long thread from vanishing before the discussion has ended.
KNode can not predict whether there will be a reply after the set conditions are fulfilled; you will have to find your own settings for this. Some newsgroups have days between replies; others only hours. Use your own judgement.
This option refers to the memory behaviour of KNode. If an article in a folder is deleted it will be marked as deleted but still take up space on your hard disk; with this option you can tell KNode to actually delete the articles and free the hard-disk space regularly.
You can force this check by selecting -> or for all folders together with ->.
After the configuration of KNode we will now try to get your first news; to achieve this, you need to do some more steps of configuration, but you will not have to do this very often.
If you want to read a newsgroup you first have to subscribe to it. mouse button-click with your mouse on the entry of your newsserver in the folder-list; from the context menu that appears select the entry. KNode, at this moment, does not know which newsgroups are available from this server and will ask you if it should fetch a list of available newsgroups: confirm with . Now you should see the following dialogue.
The Subscribe to Newsgroups dialogue
After some time KNode will has fetched the list of available newsgroups and will show them in the left window, Groups on, in a tree; this tree view shows the newsgroup hierarchy.
You can find a short description about the structure of the usenet and the hierarchy of the single newsgroups at http://www.kirchwitz.de/~amk/dni/usenet-einfuehrung (German).
The simplest method to navigate in the tree is to use the Search input field: KNode will filter the groups displayed according to your input. If you are searching for a group about KDE, but you do not know its exact position in the hierarchy, just type kde in the Search field.
When you enter the k, you will already see the list changing; the second letter, d, give you a significantly-reduced list of shown groups; and the final e reduces the list to the groups with kde in their name. You will most likely end with just one group:
| comp.windows.x.kde |
If your server carries the international groups, you might find your list is:
| comp.windows.x.kde |
| de.comp.os.unix.apps.kde |
This incremental search gives you the possibility to search for newsgroups without knowing their exact paths.
On a closer look, you will see KNode showing the groups without a tree if there are only a few groups left; this is not a bug, it is a feature.
Normally KNode shows all the groups in a tree; if this option is activated, all newsgroups are listed amongst one another.
If subscribed only is checked the tree-view Groups on shows only the groups you are already subscribed to; this is very convenient if you want to unsubscribe from some groups: you then won't have to search the whole tree for these groups.
If new only is checked the tree-view Groups on shows only the groups which are new since you last fetched the group list; for this to be functional, you first have to fetch a new group list with .
The button give the possibility to show all the new groups since a specific date.
This list shows all newsgroups on this server; if you check one of the checkboxes, subscribed only or new only, you get the corresponding selection.
The Current changes window shows all changes you have made since you opened the dialogue.
The subscribe to list shows the newsgroups you have chosen to subscribe to.
Below you can see the unsubscribe from list, which shows all newsgroups from which you have chosen to unsubscribe. You cannot unsubscribe from groups you are not subscribed to.
This button opens a dialogue which allows you to configure the list of new groups; you can choose between showing all groups since the last refresh or all groups since a given date. With the date option, KNode provides a more-flexible possibility to check for new groups; you can even check for new groups since before the last refresh of the group list.
The button tells KNode to fetch a new group list from the news server.
The newsgroup hierarchy is in a constant flux; all the time there are groups introduced, renamed or moved; some groups just disappear: they are no longer available and get deleted. To reflect this, KNode gives you the possibility to refresh the the group list. This is, normally, only needed to see if your server now provides a group which was not there before.
If you simply want to make sure you have seen every new group, it is more effective to use ; fetching the complete list is much more time consuming, but you do make sure that any deleted groups vanish from the grouplist.
Unfortunately there is no guarantee that your newsserver is providing all available newsgroups: many newsserver refuse groups publishing binary attachments; other groups are only available from special servers. KNode provides you the possibility to use more than one news-server if you want to access alternative servers providing these groups; you can read more about this in the section called “Managing Multiple News Accounts” .
We now want to subscribe to the KDE group: mark the the box beside the name; you can now see the group in the list labelled subscribe to. Another possibility is to use the arrows between the two windows.
If you picked the wrong newsgroup by mistake you can undo your selection by unchecking the checkbox next to the group's name in the Groups on window; again, you could use the arrow (you probably noticed the arrow changing direction.)
If you want to unsubscribe from a newsgroup it is as easy as subscribing to it: you just uncheck the box next to its name. The groups you wish to unsubscribe from are shown in the unsubscribe from list. Again, the arrow is another way of doing things: to correct your actions you can use the arrow again; this works as long as the dialogue is not closed by clicking .
As a KDE and KNode user you will probably want to subscribe to the group, so make sure you checked the box and press . This group now appears in the tree view under the server entry it was chosen from; in our example this is My News Account. If you can not see the group, click on the cross next to the server entry or on the server entry itself; the list of subscribed newsgroups should appear.
Click on the newsgroup; now you see on the right in the article view an empty folder: KNode has to fetch the articles for the new newsgroup. If you have, in ->->->, the check box Check for new article automatically checked KNode tries to fetch the articles from the server when the newsgroup is first selected; if this is unchecked, you have to use ->.
When you are using leafnode as a server, there will be a single article in the group: leafnode generates an article in every new subscribed group; this indicates that leafnode will consider this group the next time it fetches articles. You can ignore an error message saying the article can not be found. If you select this article you tell leafnode you are really interested in this group.
You get the real articles when your local newsserver fetches them from the Internet and provides them to you; details about this can be found in the documentation of your local newsserver.
When everything works the articles of the subscribed newsgroup appear in the upper right window — the article view.
KNode always shows three views: the folder view, the article view and the article window; you can change height and width of these views with the mouse. If you click in a window it gets the focus; this is important if you want to use KNode with the keyboard. The Tab key changes the focus between the views; the currently-active view is indicated by a small colored bar over the column headers.
This picture shows KNode with the subscribed KDE newsgroup.
The three views of KNode
It is possible to select more than one group or article. You can select an area by clicking on the first entry with the mouse button, holding the Shift key and clicking on the last entry with the mouse button again.
If you want to select more than one single entry, but they are not next to each other in the list, you have to select the first by clicking on it with the mouse button and then select the other entries by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on them with the mouse button.
In either case you can clear your selection by clicking on another entry with the mouse button.
If you have selected more than one entry you have to activate the context menu with the Shift key pressed, otherwise you'll clear the selection.
The folder views contains not only the accounts you configured — in our example this is My News Account — but also three other folders. When you are subscribed to some newsgroups there will be plus next to the name of the account: clicking on the plus or the name of the account opens the tree to show the names of the newsgroups you have chosen to subscribe to using that account.
Using the mouse button you can get a context menu for the selected item (folders or newsgroups): if you select a newsgroup and choose Properties you can, amongst other things, specify your identity for this particular group; you can find more about this in the Local Identities chapter.
When you select a newsgroup with your mouse a list of articles of this group appears in the upper-right window; if there are no articles in the upper-right window there are two possibilities — either there are no articles for this newsgroup on the newsserver or the newsserver did not fetch them yet. Select ->: if there are still no articles appearing you either have some problems with your settings or there really are no articles for this group. Try another group: if there are no articles for this group you will probably have to work through the first chapters, about the configuration of KNode, again; the Frequently Asked Questions chapter may help you, too.
If you are using a local newsserver the articles only appear if the newsserver has already got them from the internet; if you are using leafnode this is done by the fetchnews program.
The newsgroup folders appear with the name they are given by the hierarchy on the newsserver; in our example this is comp.windows.x.kde. You can change the name shown in this view: in the context menu (click with the mouse button on the newsgroup's name) choose , then you can change the name in the input field. A good name for comp.windows.x.kde would be, for example, The KDE Newsgroup.
If you don't change this, the hierarchical name will still be shown.
Besides the name of newsgroups the folder view shows more information by altering its appearance: if a newsgroup contains new articles its name is shown bold; the columns Total and Unread also tell you how many articles are in the corresponding group or folder and how many are marked as unread.
The Outbox folder contains all articles which are to be sent later, or which could not be sent because of an error. If you want to sent an article later choose -> in the editor: the article is then filed in the Outbox folder; it is possible to edit, delete or send these articles later.
If an article was not sent because of an error, it is stored in this folder; you will not lose these articles.
This folder is used for storing drafts of your articles; for example, if you want to do some further work on them but you have no time for it right now. To store an article in this folder choose -> in the editor.
You can edit, delete and send the articles in this folder.
This folder contains copies of the articles that you have successfully sent, including your e-mail replies; you can delete the messages in this folder, but it will not un-send the messages already sent.
If your are using a local newsserver an article appearing in the folder Sent only indicates the local newsserver received the article; it is possible this article will never appears in any newsgroup if the local newsserver was not able to send it for some reason. If you notice some articles not appearing in the according newsgroup first make sure it was sent by the local newsserver.
If you are using leafnode then articles leafnode was unable to send are normally found in /var/spool/failed.postings.
The article view gives you a list of all articles in the selected newsgroup or folder; you can change the appearance of this view using the menu. The uppermost row of the view contains the column headers.
The Subject column shows the subjects of an articles which, most of the time, give you a clue about the content of this article. The subject is chosen by the article author. You can find more about this in How to post and reply to news.
The From column shows the author, or their e-mail address if the author didn't give a name. You can configure your settings in ->+Identity; when you publish an article KNode will show these settings in the From column.
The Score column shows the scoring of an article as a number; the default is 0. Articles which are important to you can be scored up; articles you want to ignore can be scored down: the range is -100000 to +100000. You can read more about this in the Scoring, Watching and Ignoring chapter.
The Score column is only shown if ->+Reading News+General+Show article score is activated.
The Date column shows the date and time when the article was written.
The Lines column shows the number of lines of the article; this column is only shown if ->+Reading News+General+Show line count is activated.
This is a short explanation of the different symbols for labelling articles.
Already-read articles are labelled with this symbol.
Articles labelled with this symbol are read and the body was fetched from the server.
Articles labelled with this symbol are unread and the body has not yet been fetched.
Articles labeled with this symbol are unread but the body has already been already fetched.
Articles labelled with this symbol are part of a thread with new and/or unread articles in it.
Articles labelled with this symbol are parts of a guarded thread. This corresponds to a score of 100.
Besides different symbols, KNode is using the following highlighting:
The article is new in this group; it was fetched during the last connection with the server.
There are no unread follow-up articles.
You can navigate in articles, display an article and open or close threads with your mouse or keyboard.
When you select an article with your mouse its entry in the the article view gets colored; at the same time the header and body of this article appear in in the article window. If you want to read another article you can use the mouse to select it, or you can use the cursor keys. If you use the cursor keys you can move the dashed frame to the article you want to read and then press Enter to mark and display the article.
There are many key commands to provide comfortable navigation within a news group and to switching between newsgroups. Here the most common key commands of the standard key configuration are listed; you can configure the key bindings in ->.
The replies to an article are either shown or hidden by multiply pressing this key; another way to open threads is to use the Right Arrow key.
A dialogue is shown where you can choose the filter for the articles.
A dialogue is shown where you can change the sorting of the articles; if you choose a column for a second time it will change the sorting direction.
This key gives you a convenient possibility for browsing through the article view: by pressing this key the article in the article window is scrolled; when you reach the end of the article by repeatedly pressing Space, it takes you to the next article; when you have read all articles in one newsgroup, Space takes you to the first article of the next newsgroup. By repeatedly pressing Space you can browse through all subscribed newsgroups like this.
This key binding jumps to the next unread article. The sequence follows the order of articles in the article view; threads are opened if necessary.
This command jumps to the next thread containing unread articles: the first unread article is then selected and shown. The sequence follows the order of articles in the article view.
This command jumps to the next article; the sequence follows the order of articles in the article view. Replies in closed threads are ignored.
This command jumps to the previous article in the group; the sequence follows the order of articles in the article view. Replies in closed threads are ignored.
This command jumps to the next newsgroup; the sequence follows the order of newsgroups in the folder view.
This command jumps to the previous newsgroup; the sequence follows the order of newsgroups in the folder view.
Some newsgroups are very crowded and contain lots of articles; perhaps only some of them are interesting to you. One possibility to keep track of the news you are interested in is to sort your articles with a certain criterion.
Sorting your articles, and choosing sorting criteria, is done with the column titles in the article view: clicking on a column title makes it the current sorting criterion; another click on the same column title changes the order of sorting.
The current sorting criterion is indicated with an arrow next to the title; this gives you an easy sign which column is used for sorting, too. You have to make the column wide enough, though, so you can actually see the arrow; you can change the column width by moving the mouse pointer on the small area between two column titles: the pointer changes its appearance to two horizontal arrows; clicking and holding the mouse button mouse button now allows you to change the width of the column to the left of the mouse pointer.
KNode gives you the possibility to reduce the flood of articles: you can show only articles fitting specific criteria; KNode uses filters for this task. In the following paragraphs we are just dealing with the predefined filters; for defining and using your own filters please refer to the Defining and using Filters chapter.
Normally you will read most articles only once, and then never again. KNode labels the articles which are unread, but when there are more articles in a news group than can be shown by the article view you often have to search for unread articles: it would be much easier to see only the new fetched and unread articles; KNode gives you this feature by the predefined filters.
In the status line at the bottom border of your main window next to the word Filter the actually-active filter is shown: if you do not change the filter configuration this is the filter all; this means all articles of a newsgroup are shown. all is one of the predefined filters; there are eight of them in all, which are described in more detail here.
This filter is the default setting; it shows all articles in a newsgroup. You can choose this filter by selecting ->->
This filter shows only unread articles; you can choose this filter by selecting ->->
This filter shows only articles fetched during the last connection; you can choose this filter by selecting ->->
This shows only threads chosen as watched threads by you; you may be watching a thread because, for example, you are participating in it, or because you are particularly interested in the answers. You can choose this filter by selecting ->->
This filter only shows something if have you selected one or more threads to watch; you can achieve this by selecting ->->: next to the subject a symbol will appear, showing a pair of eyes.
This filter shows only threads containing unread articles; you can choose this filter by selecting ->->
This filter shows only threads with newly-fetched articles; you can choose this filter by selecting ->->
This filter only articles you have published; you can choose this filter by selecting ->->
This filter only shows threads containing articles you have published; you can choose this filter by selecting ->->
For everyday use the unread filter is propably the most useful: it shows all unread articles, including the old ones. The other filters are very task-specific and are seldom used; in the end it is a matter of taste which filter to select.
The article window shows the currently-selected article. You can scroll in it like in a normal text editor window; the difference is that you cannot change the article — it is for reading only.
By pressing the mouse button in the article viewer you can access the important functions in the context menu very quickly.
The window itself is divided in three areas; they are explained in more detail now.
This part shows the header lines or a part of the header. You will recognize some information here from the article view; for example, the subject and the address or name where the article originated. When you click on the From: address, KNode opens an editor window where the email address of the author and the subject of the referring article are already filled in for you; this enables you to reply to the author directly from their article.
The appearance and content of the header shown by default can be configured by choosing ->+Reading News+Headers; you can find a more-detailed view on this in Configuring the Shown Headers.
By selecting -> you force KNode to show the whole header as is produced by the newsreader and newsservers; normally you do not need this view: it needs a lot of space in the article window.
The last lines of the header contain, if necessary, some references to other articles, shown as numbers in the range from 1 to n. These References are the articles to which the current article refers: the article labeled with 1 is the oldest article to which this article refers; the article with the highest number is the most-recent article to which the current article refers.
When you click on a reference the corresponding article is loaded and shown in the article view; if the article is no longer available you will be informed by KNode. This will happen if the article has been deleted by the article management of KNode due to its age, or your news server decided to delete it from the newsgroup; for details on how to get such an article, please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions.
The first lines in an article, with the subject and author information and so on, are called headers.
The body of the article follows straight after the header; it is the actual message the author published in the newsgroup. Be aware that some articles may contain quotes from other articles which are not recognisable as quotes; this depends on the news editor the author used and their article-formatting habits.
KNode provides some formatting which can be used by articles; at the moment the available options are:
| /italic/ |
| *bold* |
| _underlined_ |
Do not use the highlighting too often; the impact decreases the more it is used.
The main part of the message (the contents) is called the body.
Most of the time a quote is indicated by a prefixed > on every line; however, there are other possible signs. If you can not directly recognize a quote the author did not obey the rules of proper quoting.
Also, it is usual to start an answer with a introductionary line, something like:
On 12/25/2000 Santa Claus wrote:
Normally you do not have to concern yourself with these introductionary lines: KNode does this automatically when you reply to an article; to find out how to customize this line see The Composer Settings documentation.
In ->+Reading News+Appearance you can choose how the articles are shown. In particular, KNode provides the smart coloring of different reply levels; you can read more about this in the chapter Configuring the appearance.
KNode only supports the colouring of quotes if the quoting lines starts with special characters; you can configure these characters at ->+Reading News+Viewer.
When the body of an article contains links to internet addresses you can invoke an internet browser to display the web page it links to by clicking on the link; details about configuring this feature can be found in General news settings.
Below the main text of an article you can find the signature of the author, provided you did not disable signatures in ->+Reading News+General. The signature is divided from the text by thin horizontal line.
If an article contains attachments they are shown below the signature in a table.
The multipart MIME format allows the body of an article to be sent in more than one format; for example, in plain-text and in HTML. It depends on the newsreader which format is used for reading the article.
KNode allows the different formats to be shown by selecting ->+Reading News+Viewer+Show alternative contents as attachments; when this option is checked all alternative formats are shown as attachments and can be opened and viewed.
If this option is unchecked you will not be shown the different text formats and KNode decides which one should be shown.
Before you start writing articles or replying to other Usenet users be sure you understand the habits of the current newsgroup; again, reading A Journey Through Usenet would be a good idea.
For testing the settings of KNode please resist sending an article to a random newsgroup; it is not very friendly to bother people with test articles: what if you are subscribed to a newsgroup and half of its articles only contain the word “test”? It is like somebody calling you just to testing their phone.
This is the reason for the special groups having “test” in their name; for example, alt.test. In these groups you can test everything you want without bothering anybody; some groups even send you error messages back.
Here you can easily identify obvious mistakes, like a missing or a wrong e-mail address or a wrongly-configured charset which doesn't show all special characters.
You can find a selection of test groups in Test Groups.
Subscribe to one of the test groups now; some news servers have their own test groups, which are probably less crowded.
Remember, you have to download the articles of the new subscribed group; this may take some time if there are many articles in the group. The only important articles are yours and the answers by the check handler; if you want to reduce the number of articles fetched during the test you can configure this in +Configure KNode...+Reading News+General+Maximal number of articles to fetch: if you reduce this dramatically, you should not wait too long to fetch the new articles after sending your test article; however, if it set too low your article might not be fetched. A tolerably-fast news server should provide your article right after you sent it; you might, however, have to wait a while, at worst 1 or 2 days. Feel free to send another article if cannot see your initial one; this is what the test groups are for.
When you are using a local news server the configuration of Maximal number of articles to fetch in KNode is probably unnecessary; you should consult the documentation of your news server instead.
If you did not encounter any errors unsubscribe from the test groups and set Maximum number of articles to fetch back to normal (1000).
You have seen most of KNode now, but have only used it passively so far, so let's publish a test article now. Select the new subscribed test group in the folder view; then, with ->or the key P, the Editor will be opened.
You can use the KNode Editor like a normal Texteditor; there are some additional features for writing news articles though.
In the editor window there are two input lines: one for the subject, which is empty at the moment; and another for the newsgroups this article is going to be posted to.
Enter the text This is a test in the subject field.
Normally, when you post an article, use a descriptive subject. Articles without a descriptive subject are often ignored. Avoid subjects like “Help, it doesn't work !!!!!” This subject gives no information about the content of your article.
The Groups: field already contains the test newsgroup you selected before; do not change this.
Below the input field for the newsgroup there is another inactive option field: this function is explained later in the chapter The editor; for now it is irrelevant.
For simplicity reasons we will only use a simple sentence; type:
This is the body of my test article. @ $ %
Then, enter an empty line, followed by:
Did it work?
This may look funny to you, but it does what it is supposed to do — test your configuration..
Your article should now look like the screenshot below:
Your first article
If you are using KNode with a local newsserver choose -> in the Editor; if you do not have a connection to a newsserver at this point, you may want to send the article later — you can achieve this by using -> — KNode then stores this article in the folder Outbox. You can start sending the articles in the Outbox manually by selecting ->.
After sending the article you will notice KNode stores a copy in the Sent folder.
Depending on how fast your article is published in the according newsgroup you can check the result after some time: mostly it is sufficient to check for new messages immediately after sending the article; be patient, though, it may take the article some hours before reaching the newsgroup. If the article does not arrive after a number of hours it is likely that something went wrong: try again; then, if it is still not working, have a look at the Frequently Asked Questions.
Even when you are using a local news server, you have to check for new articles: the local news server just sends the article, it does not store it in the local newsgroup, so you have to synchronize with an external news server if you want to see if your test article has arrived.
If the article appears in the newsgroup you are successful; now you should check if there is the correct sender and if the article is readable. Have a look on your language-specific characters like the German umlauts; if they are not readable you have to change the coding at ->+Posting News+Technicalto Allow 8-bit. Change this and repeat your test.
If everything is right you have successfully published your first article in usenet with KNode.
After successfully publishing an article we will now answer to your own article. You want to answer the question you asked, don't you?
Select your article in the article view and press the mouse button: a context menu will appear; choose .
KNode opens the Editor again, but this time there is already a subject filled in for you. The subject line reads:
Re: This is a test
Re: is a shortcut for the Latin “In re”, which translates to something along the lines of “relating to”. You should not change the subject and, above all, the Re:: most newsreaders sort threads by the subject.
If you want to change the subject for some reason put the new subject in front of the old and replace the Re: with a bracketed (Was: ... ); in our example this would look like
A new subject! (Was: This is a test)
With this kind of subject you show the other readers there is a branch in the original discussion; this happens, for example, when a new topic occurs in the original discussion or the original subject has changed for some reason.
If you answer to an article with such a subject, delete the bracketed part of the subject; the first part with a prefixed Re: remains.
Re: A new subject!
Let us have look at the Editor now. The contents of the article to which we want to reply has already been copied to the Editor by KNode; to indicate the text is a quote every line is prefixed with a >.
In front of the quoted text KNode has put an introduction line: the content of this line refers to the original author; you can change the standard text of this line in ->+Posting News+Composer+Introduction Phrase:.
The original article contains the question: Did it work? We want to answer this question now.
Place the cursor below the quoted question and write in the next line:
Yes it worked, congratulations!
We are not finished yet: it is considered polite to begin with a greeting like “Hello” in the first line; whether you call the author by their name or not depends on your habits, watch the newsgroup to get used to the habits there.
Next we delete all non-mandatory parts of the quoted article; in our case, we delete all parts except the question.
With such a short text this is unnecessary, but this just an example: if you have to read a message 100 lines long again just to find an [I agree] at the end you will understand.... Aside from this, it makes articles smaller so they use less space on the server.
At the end we say good bye.
This screenshot shows our answer before sending it.
Your answer to your article
You can find a good guide for correct quoting at http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren (German).
Now we still need to post our reply; like posting the original message choose -> or the alternative ->, if you're not online at the moment and you're not using a local newsserver. If everything works you will see your article in the newsgroup after a while; easy, isn't it?
Using the menu you can configure whether you want to send an email, a news article or both.
The Mail Reply follows the same lines as posting a reply in a newsgroup; the only difference is that a mail reply is sent directly to the author and does not appear in any newsgroup.
Sometimes it is better to use an emailed reply instead of posting a reply to newsgroup; they are used primarily for when you want to correct an error or misconduct by the author, without hurting their feelings by doing so publicly on the newsgroup.
To answer with an e-mail select your article; again, open the context menu with the right mouse button; and choose : KNode opens the Composer with the quoted article.
Subject and body are identical as when posting an article but the Groups: field is replaced by a To: field; here the author's email address appears. In our example this should be your own email address, if KNode is set up correctly.
For emails the same rules for quoting and politeness apply as for posting an article in a newsgroup.
After finishing your Reply, you can send it.
The screenshot below shows the reply we distributed by email.
A Mail Reply
The Mail Reply only works if you have used the correct settings in ->+Accounts+Mail.
Depending on the configuration of your computer, you will find the reply in your mailbox; you might have to connect to your ISP and fetch your new mail first though.
On the menu you can configure whether you want to send an email, a news article or both.
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You may already have read about using filters in the chapter explaining the configuration of KNode; there, we were talking about the built-in filters provided by KNode there. You can configure the built-in filters like all the others. The screenshot below shows the dialogue box for configuring the filters.
While filters and scoring are very powerful and have many uses, one of the most common requirements is simply to add all posts written by someone you don't wish to read to a “killfile”. At the end of this section is a quick guide to using filters and scores to create such a killfile.
The New Filter dialogue
First we will create a new filter. You may, at some point, want to find your own articles amongst all the others; or, you may not want to see the articles posted by a particular person at all: both cases can be solved by a simple filter on the Sender. Here are some examples:
Procedure 2.1. Do Not Show The Articles by a Particular Person
->+Reading News+Filters
Select
Insert Do not show idiot in the Text Box Name
To make the filter appear on the menu, check Show in menu.
Go to the From area.
Choose Does NOT contain from the drop-down box.
Insert the name of the person you want to ignore in the now- active Text Box; for example, Idiot.
Confirm the filter settings with .
The filter now shows all articles, except the ones containing “Idiot” in the From: line.
You can combine the settings of the 'Subject + From' tab with the settings on the other tabs. For example:
Procedure 2.2. Show only discussion with unread follow-ups on own articles.
->+Reading News+Filters
Select the predefined filter threads with own articles
Select
Insert My threads with unread in the Name field.
Select the Status tab
Select has new followups
Select true in the drop-down box next to it.
Confirm the filter settings with
This filter shows all the threads your are participating in which have unread messages; also, you have seen the possibility of using existing filters as a base for new ones: this makes life easier for complex filters.
Procedure 2.3. Show all articles, no older than 3 days, containing KNode in the subject.
->+Reading News+Filters
Select
Insert Latest KNode threads in the Name field.
To make the filter appear in the menu, check show in menu.
From the apply on drop-down box select single articles
Go to the Subject area and select does contain in the drop-down box.
Insert knode in the text box.
Change to the Additional tab
Select the Age check box
Enter the following settings: 0 < days <= 3
Confirm the filter settings with
This filter, now, shows all articles, no older than 3 days, containing knode in the subject.
KNode offers viewing filters (all, unread only, my posts etc.) and scoring filters (threads and articles start with a score of zero and can be adjusted according to author, thread etc.).
Using viewing filters you could hide articles according to poster, but this is not really suitable when you want to kill several posters universally.
Using the scoring gives lots of control but filters only at the thread level, i.e. you can watch and ignore threads; the disadvantage of this, however, is that you may lose otherwise-useful threads just because of one poster.
The solution is to use these in combination.
Procedure 2.4. Creating a Killfile
Go to ->+Reading News+Filters.
Create a new filter below unread, called killfile on. Be sure that Apply to single articles is set and then click on the Additional tab. Set score “equal to or less than zero” (<=); then click the until you have exited the dialogue.
Open an article whose author should be killed and just type Ctrl+L(or select, from the menu, ). This opens the Rule Editor (a part of scoring). You can optionally give the rule a name that matches the author (Kook, for example.) and then, if this is to be permanent, uncheck the expire automatically box; you'll see that this rule will change the author's score to minus ten (or the score you entered); finally, click .
Go to the menu item ->->
This will cause any articles with scores less than zero will disappear; to kill additional authors you only need repeat the Ctrl+L part of these instructions.
The KNode composer provides many features, especially for posting and replying to articles.
By selecting the Button Browse you can choose additional newsgroups you want to publish your article in.
It is generally undesirable to post articles in multiple newsgroups: please think twice about it; if you are not sure where to post your article ask in one of the possible groups — somebody will tell you were to post.
The main use of this feature is when a thread has gone off topic for the newsgroup in which it is posted; for example, a thread may start in a KDE newsgroup discussing how to redirect a followup in KNode, but may leads to a discussion about graphical and text based newsreaders.
Sometimes it happens that usenet users post an article into the wrong newsgroup; very often those articles are just ignored. If it looks like the author did this unintentionally, you might like to tell them politely and make the followup articles go into the right group.
Another reason for using Followup-To: is a when dealing with articles cross-posted across in multiple newsgroups: you should take care that the replies are only posted in one single newsgroup.
You can activate this by filling the text box Followups - To:; here you can enter the suitable group. If there are multiple newsgroups in the Groups: field, they are shown in the drop-down list.
If you enter poster here, instead of a newsgroup, the replies will go directly to the author, not to the newsgroup.
Some people put an email address here, but this is not a valid entry: use poster and correctly set your Reply-To address in the normal KNode settings.
Using -> you can start an editor of your choice for editing the reply; this way you can use your preferred Editor for writing articles and e-mails.
By selecting -> you can open the File Selection Dialogue Box; here you can choose the file you want to attach.
Most of the time, KNode determines the correct MIME type for the attachment; if KNode detects it incorrectly, you can correct the MIME type manually.
This screenshot shows the Composer with 2 attachments: a text file and a PNG picture.
Sending Attachments
Only do this if you know what you're doing! An incorrect MIME type could cause the attachment to be sent incorrectly, or mean that the attachment will not be able to be rebuilt after sending.
The English word attachment is used all over the world; you can use it in your language, too.
In most newsgroups, attachments are prohibited: do not send unsolicited attachments; if you are asked to send them, look who is asking for them — normally, the person will want you to send them by email.
The news server will probably reject articles with attachments for most groups anyway; those that do accept attachments normally have the word “binaries” in their name. Some news servers even stop carrying non-binaries newsgroups that continuously receive attachments.
Sooner or later, you will want to search for one specific article; the KNode search feature is an easy way to do this.
You can reach the search function by selecting -> or the by pressing F4. The screenshot below shows the Search Dialogue Box.
The Search Dialogue Box
The Search Dialogue Box has four tabs which allow several search criteria: the first tab contains the settings for the Subject and From criteria; the second tab contains the settings for the message-IDs of an article and its references; the third tab contains the settings for the Status of an article; the fourth tab, Additional, contains the remaining criteria.
You have probably already noticed the similarities between the Filter Dialogue Box and the Search Dialogue Box: the usage is the same and should not be too complicated if you have already defined your own filters.
KNode always searches in the currently-active newsgroup; a search in all newsgroups is not possible at the moment. After the Search has finished the articles found appear in the article view; when you close the Search Dialogue Box using the search results are deleted, and the old view of the newsgroup appears again.
With this button you start the Search with the search criteria you defined; all articles in the selected newsgroup, fulfilling these criteria, appear in the article view.
This chapter deals with superseding and cancelling articles. You will not use these two features very often, but they do exist should you, one day, need them.
Both functions need a news server prepared to handle them; you should also remember that there is no guarantee that no one has already read your article before it is superseded or cancelled.
So first think, then post.
Cancelling an article means deleting it from the newsgroup.
Why should you want to cancel an article? Perhaps you flamed somebody in a rage and now you want to get this article out of the newsgroup because you regret what you wrote: a personal insult, read by everybody, doesn't look good, especially when you regret it; so, there is only one thing you can do — cancel the article.
Select the article you want to cancel and choose from its context menu. If you are sure it is the right article, confirm KNodes question with . Now you will be asked if you want to send the Cancel message now or later; for this example we decide to send it . You will notice the new message in the folder Outbox.
Now we want to look at the so-called cancel message. In the subject you will find something like:
cancel of <n177m8.1m.ln@konqui.org>
This strange letters between the brackets are the Message-ID of the article you want to cancel. This message tells the newsserver to delete your article: if you look at complete header of this message, by selecting ->, you will notice a line with the name control and the content cancel <xxxxx@ddddd.dd> — this line tells the server that this message is a control message and, in our case, tells the server to cancel your article.
You can still delete the control message from the Outbox should you change your mind.
Keep in mind that articles can only be identified by their Message-IDs; you need this Message-ID if you want to cancel an article. Normally, your article gets a Message-ID when it arrives at the newsserver — that's why you can only cancel an article once it has been published. The articles in the Sent folder have no Message-ID, so you cannot cancel them from there.
There is one exception: if you have configured KNode to generate a Message-ID you can cancel you articles in folder Sent too.
KNode allows only to cancel your own articles: it refuses to cancel articles from other authors.
Since the cancel feature is so easily fooled, by newsreaders that let you cancel any post, many news servers do not acknowledge cancel messages from posters; even if your own ISP accepts the cancel and passes it on, many other servers will ignore it and will not pass it on.
You should consider any previously-sent article, cancelled or not, to be published and publicly available.
Supersede overwrites your article with a new version. One reason for doing this could be:
You have written a long article and have already posted it; now, you have found an error in this article: you could cancel this article, and post a new, corrected, article; or, you can use Supersede.
Select the article in the article view. From its context menu select . KNode will ask you if you really want to overwrite this article; if you confirm with the Composer appears.
In the Composer you can now make the desired corrections and changes. You can then publish this article in the same way as you post every other article; when the newsserver receives this article it reads some special lines in the header which tell the newsserver to supersede the older article. Select -> for now, because we want to look at the article's header in the Outbox.
Activate ->, because we want to see all the headers the newsserver receives. You will notice a line like:
Supersedes: <oggcm8.4n5.ln@konqi.org>
This is the instruction for the newsserver for superseding the article with the Message-ID <oggcm8.4n5.ln@konqi.org> with the new article.
Besides this, Supersede is used for periodical posted articles, e.g. an FAQ. The new article supersedes the old one and the newsgroups do not end up with lots of different versions.
Again, using this function is only possible if the article already has a Message-ID. Normally, articles get their Message-ID from the newsserver: this means that you can only supersede articles which have already been published.
You can configure KNode to generate this Message-ID, then you can supersede your articles in the folder Sent, too.
KNode allows you to only supersede your own articles.
As with cancels, supersede messages have been abused in the past, with, for example, certain parties sending hundreds or even thousands of them to overwrite legitimate posts with random computer generated junk; again, as with cancels, many news servers do not honour supersede messages, nor do they pass them on.
Score, Watch and Ignore are different names for the same feature.
By scoring a thread, you determine its importance. KNode allows scores between -100000 and 100000. A normal article will get a score of 0 if you do not change this; threads with a score below 0 are less important than average; threads with a score above 0 are more important than average.
The score is an attribute of the thread and the articles in this thread, so you can use the score for filtering and searching articles; for example, you can define a filter to show only articles with a score > 0, i.e. all articles in which you are specifically interested.
The function Watch sets the score of all article in a thread to 100; this way they get a high score and KNode labels them with a special icon.
The function Ignore does the opposite: it scores all articles in a thread with -100 so KNode does not show these articles anymore.
The English word “scoring” is used in many other countries, too.
You can score an article or a thread manually with the right mouse button or with the menu — here you can score with Watch Thread and Ignore Thread directly. Apart from scoring manually you can let KNode score the articles with scoring rules automatically; you can configure these rules at ->->-> or at -> — the only difference between these dialogues is that the last one has the rule-list next to the rule configuration. In the following guide I'm using the editor that appears if -> is chosen.
The Rule Editor
The composer consists of 4 areas: on the left side is the list of the rules; with the buttons below the list you can add, delete or copy an existing rule; below that you have the possibility to limit the rules which are shown — you have the choice whether to show all rules or only the rules for a specific newsgroup.
If you chose a rule-name in the list you the rule will be displayed on the right-hand side; now you can edit the rule. At the top you can change the name of the rule and set the newsgroups to which this rule applies. You can choose one or more than one group, note that group names must be separated by a semicolon. You can choose from the subscribed groups with the drop-down list and the button; or you can use regular expressions and wild cards, e.g. “.*” for all groups. The Expire rule automatically option makes it possible to delete the rule automatically after the configured number of days; this is useful if a specific person behaves badly and you do not want to read anything from this person for a few days.
In the Condition field you enter the condition on which this rule is activated. Normally, you can enter only one condition, but you can change this by pressing the and buttons. If you have more than one condition, you must tell knode whether all conditions need to be fulfilled or only one of them; this can be done by choosing Match all conditions or Match any condition respectively.
Each condition consists of 2 drop-down lists and a text field. In the first list you chose the part of the message which should be used for the condition — this part will be compared with the text field; the second drop-down list tells KNode how it is to be compared, for example, whether the chosen header should be identical to the text entered in the text field, or if it just needs to match part of it. Regular expressions are allowed, too. If you check Not then the conditions under which the condition is satisfied are reversed, and the condition will be satisfied if the opposite of its shown conditions is true.
Now, let's have a look at some examples.
Maybe you want to filter away all the postings by Theodor Test; to do this choose the From header line from the first drop-down list, choose is exactly the same as from the second drop-down list, and enter his name in the text field. But, before doing this you should have a look at the header of one of Theodor's articles and see what is in the “From” line.
If you do not want to read articles with more than 100 lines, choose the header entry Lines from the first drop-down list, choose greater than from the second, and enter 100 in the text field. You probably, then, want to score down the message.
Last example: of course, you're very interested in every article that refers to KNode. Choose the header entry Subject, then contains substring and enter knode in the text field. But what do you do if KNode is not mentioned in the Subject? I suggest using a regular expression: change contains substring to matches regular expression and type knode|newsreader|usenet into the text field to match either knode, newsreader or usenet — the | symbol means OR. Alternatively, you can make 3 conditions — one that matches knode, one that matches newsreader and so on — and choose Match any condition; but, this needs a lot of space and it is not very elegant, is it?
Once your condition is ready you should set an action down in the Actions section. The most important action is adjust score; if this action is chosen you can raise or lower the score, by the configured value, for articles to which this rule applies. KNode can also show you a little message when finding such an article or colourise the header in the article list; for example, you could make interesting articles screaming pink so you would notice them very quickly.
When leaving the editor, or when the -> menu item is chosen, the rules are executed; furthermore, the rules are automatically used for new articles. Scoring makes the most sense when used with filters: by scoring some articles down and filtering them away they won't appear in the article list.
With KNode you can use a different identity with every newsgroup to which you are subscribed; i.e. you can set a name, email address, reply-to address and signature to use with that group.
It is easy to set group identities. First, with the right mouse button, click on the name of the newsgroup in which to have a different identity in; then, select from the context menu that appears. In the dialogue that appears the second tab contains fields identical to the global identity settings; enter your settings here and click to confirm the changes: then, your articles in this group will always posted with this newly-entered identity.
When you unsubscribe from a group you lose its identity settings for this group: if you re-subscribe to the group, you will need to re-enter its identity settings. For new newsgroups, the global identity is used.
KNode can handle an unlimited number of news server accounts in addition to your main news server; most users don't need this feature, but it can be very useful to if your main newsserver does not provide all groups you want to read. Typical cases of this are when support groups for commercial software are hosted on a special, private, server or binary newsgroups, which are only available from some servers.
Another example of why you sometimes need more than one newsserver is that sometimes not all interesting newsgroups are on one server; in fact, there is very often only a selection of newsgroups. For example, many servers do not support binary groups with pictures or programs; if you want such a newsgroup and your newsserver provider does not want to serve it you can configure KNode to get it from another server.
Or, perhaps you find you are just subscribed to too many newsgroups, and would like to organise them a little better; you could set up several accounts for the same server, perhaps one for groups you read every day, and one for groups you read less often, so that you do not have to search for your “everyday” groups in a long list of subscribed groups.
In order to add an new account, open the preferences dialogue via ->+Accounts+News. The button creates a new account; you then have to enter the same data as for your first account, typically a name for the account, the host name, and a user name and password if the server requires authentication. When this is done the new server will appear both in the configuration dialogue and in the group view: you can now subscribe to newsgroups.
You can delete the currently-selected account by pressing the button.
In the dialogue (available from the context menu of the newsserver) you can setup an identity for use only on this newsserver.
PGP is the most-widespread method used to encrypt or sign data. Using the PGP-signature you can verify if an article is really from the original author or if it has been changed by others. You can find PGP-programs and guides at http://www.pgpi.org.
With KNode you can sign an article with PGP and to verify PGP-signed article. After you have configured the PGP support, at ->+Signing/Verifying, you can sign articles in the editor with the -> menu item — you will be asked for your passphrase and after that the article will be signed.
Your GnuPG/PGP ID is automatically built from your name and your email address and is identical to the sender of the message (“From”-header).
To verify a PGP-signature you have to choose the menu item ->.
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The following keybindings assume you did not change the default settings.
Saves the selected article in a file.
Prints the selected article.
The messages in the Outbox folder are sent.
Disconnects the current connection to a newsserver.
Quits KNode.
Copy the selected text to the clipboard.
Selects the whole article.
Opens the Search Dialogue Box for searching in the active group.
Enables the download of an article with a specified article-ID.
When this is activated, KNode shows discussions as a tree view in the article view.
When this is activated, KNode shows the complete threads; this is only functional when Show threads is active.
When this is activated, KNode shows no threads; this is only functional when Show threads is active.
Toggles between showing and collapsing the selected thread.
Allows you to choose a filter for the article view.
Allows you to sort the article view.
Refreshes the article view
When this setting is activated, KNode shows the complete article header in the article window.
When this setting is activated, KNode shows all characters of the complete article rotated by 13 characters.
Checks the PGP signature in the article.
Activates the configured fixed-width font for the viewer.
Here you can configure the charset which is used for the articles.
Jumps to previous article in the article view.
Jumps to next article in the article view.
Jumps to the next unread article, and to the first unread article of the next newsgroup if necessary.
Jumps to the next unread thread, and to the next unread thread in the next newsgroup if necessary.
Jumps to the previous news group in the folder view
Jumps to the next newsgroup in the folder view
Connects with the active account and fetches any new messages.
Opens the Dialogue Box for subscribing to newsgroups for the active account.
Here you can expire all groups of an account manually.
Opens the properties dialogue for the active account.
Deletes the active account and all subscribed newsgroups therein.
Connects with the active account and fetches any new messages.
Checks if there are any old articles and, if so, deletes them.
Rebuilds the article view by using the configured sortings.
Sets the status of all articles in the active newsgroup to read.
Sets the status of all articles in the active newsgroup to unread.
Opens the dialogue for the group properties.
Unsubscribes from the active newsgroup
Creates a new main folder.
Creates a new subfolder.
Here you can rename the active folder.
With this function it is possible to import an MBox folder into the active folder.
With this function you can export the active folder as an MBox folder.
Removes all deleted articles from the active folder.
Removes all deleted articles from the every folder.
Deletes all articles from the active folder.
Deletes the active folder.
Opens the Composer, with the settings for writing new articles set to those of the active newsgroup.
Opens the Composer for writing a followup, with the content of the active article.
Opens the Composer for writing an e-mail to the author of the active article.
Opens the Composer for forwarding the active article as e-mail.
Set the status of the active article to“ read”
Set the status of the active article to“ unread”
Set the status of the active thread to“ read”
Set the status of the active thread to“ unread”
Generate a message which deletes the active Article in Usenet; you can only use this with your own articles.
Opens the Composer with the content of the active article; when this article is posted it overwrites the original article. You can only use this with your own articles.
The active article is opened in a new window.
The source code of the active article is opened in a new window.
Opens the Composer for editing the active article; you can only use this in the Outbox and Drafts folders.
Deletes the active article. You can only use this in the Outbox and Drafts folders.
Sends the active article. You can only use this in the Outbox and Drafts folders.
The dialogue to edit the scoring rules will be opened.
The scores will be reset and recalculated.
Creates a rule for lowering the score of all articles posted by the author of the active article.
Creates a rule for raising the score of all articles posted by the author of the active article.
Sets the score for this thread to the configured score of watched threads (standard = 100).
Sets the score for this thread to the configured score of ignored threads (standard = -100).
This option toggles whether the toolbar is shown or not.
This option toggles whether the statusbar is shown or not.
This option toggles whether the group list is shown or not.
This option toggles whether the header view is shown or not.
This option toggles whether the article is shown or not.
Opens a dialogue for configuring the key bindings.
Opens a dialogue for configuring the toolbars.
Opens a dialogue for configuring KNode.
Invokes the KDE Help system starting at the KNode help pages. (this document).
Changes the mouse cursor to a combination arrow and question mark. Clicking on items within KNode will open a help window (if one exists for the particular item) explaining the item's function.
Opens the Bug report dialogue where you can report a bug or request a “wishlist” feature.
This will display version and author information.
This displays the KDE version and other basic information.
Sends the current article immediately.
Stores the current article in the Outbox to be sent later.
Saves the current article in the Drafts folder, so you can finish editing it another time.
Deletes the current article, closing the editor.
Closes the editor window
Undo the last edit.
Redo the last action undone with the menu entry.
Cuts the currently-selected text to the clipboard, deleting it from the editor window.
Copies the selected text to the clipboard.
Pastes the current contents of the clipboard into the editor window.
Pastes the current contents of the clipboard into the editor window with a quote character (“>”) at the beginning of each line.
Selects all the text in the editor window.
Opens the Find dialogue.
Opens the Replace dialogue.
Inserts your signature at the end of the article you are editing.
Inserts the contents of a file into the editor window.
Inserts the contents of a file into the editor window and puts a box around of it.
Inserts a file as an attachment.
Toggles whether the message is to be sent as an article or not.
Toggles whether the message is to be sent as an email or not; if it's configured, an external editor will be activated.
Here you can configure the charset used for this article; normally you use us-ascii for English-speaking areas.
Toggles the word wrapping in the editor on or off.
Puts “>” in front of the marked lines.
Removes the quote characters at the beginning of the marked lines.
Puts the marked lines in an ASCII box.
Removes the ASCII box around the marked area.
Signs the article with PGP.
Rebuilds the original posting when answering to an article.
Encrypts the marked text by rotating every character 13 characters of the alphabet.
Start the external editor (if one is configured) with the current contents of the editor window.
Opens a dialogue box to check your spelling.
Toggles whether the toolbar should be shown or not.
Toggles whether the statusbar should be shown or not.
Opens a dialogue for configuring the key bindings.
Opens a dialogue for configuring the toolbars.
Open the KNode Preferences dialogue.
Invokes the KDE Help system starting at the KNode help pages. (this document).
Changes the mouse cursor to a combination arrow and question mark. Clicking on items within KNode will open a help window (if one exists for the particular item) explaining the item's function.
Opens the Bug report dialogue where you can report a bug or request a “wishlist” feature.
This will display version and author information.
This displays the KDE version and other basic information.
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| 4.1. | I have installed KDE 3, but KNode does not exist in the Menu. |
Does the entry exist? If not, maybe the kdenetwork package isn't installed (perhaps because your distribution possibly doesn't do this for you); if the entry is there, but you do not have a item in it, you should try to open a Konsole and run KNode from there. Type
If an error message appears that tells you that KNode could not be started or found please check whether the file | |
| 4.2. | When I start KNode, a message appears in the task bar but suddenly disappears without KNode being started. |
Try to start KNode from the Konsole (see previous question) and keep attention for the messages displayed there: if they do not make sense to you mark them with your mouse and copy it to the clipboard; then, ask for help on one of the KDE mailing lists or KDE news groups. | |
| 4.3. | I need an important article, but KNode doesn't have it any more; where can I find this article? |
You can find some extensive usenet archives at groups.google.com or AltaVista; they even contain articles that are several years old. | |
| 4.4. | How do I open and read several articles at the same time? |
Open the article with . | |
| 4.5. | My articles do not appear in the newsgroup. |
When you publish an article it may be some time until your news server has it; wait several hours before you send the article again. | |
| 4.6. | I want to keep an article; how do I archive it? |
Choose the article in the article view and then use -> to open a file dialogue; you can then save the article to a file. Another possibility is to copy the article to a folder. | |
| 4.7. | Some set headers do not appear for several articles in the article window; am I doing something wrong? |
This is not unusual because many headers are optional and often not contained in articles; in this case KNode does not show those header lines. | |
| 4.8. | Sometimes I see an article which refers to other articles but KNode does not show any references; why is that? |
This happens when somebody posted an article in another news group and checked the option Followup To; the article in question is then sent to your news group, but the referring article is absent. In many cases the poster tells the reason for his choice to set a followup. | |
| 4.9. | When I want to answer an article an error message appears telling me that the external editor could not be started, but the editor is correctly set. |
Have a look whether you entered the place-holder for a filename after the editor command; if not, enter it. If you want, for example, to use KEdit enter If the %f is absent, your editor cannot be run. | |
| 4.10. | Why can I not receive data from my local news server? |
If you use KNode together with with a local news server, you must make sure that this server is correctly set up and started; for further details, please consult the documentation of your local news server. TipThe availability of the local news server can easily be verified with the telnet program: open a console and type:
Followed by that, the news server should respond with: You can quit the telnet session with:
If that does not work there is either no local news server set up or the server was not started; in this case, please consult the documentation of your local news server. If you are trying to connect to a news server on the Internet you need, of course, an open (dial-in) connection and to have set up KNode to use your ISP's news server; your ISP should be able to give you information about which news servers you can use. |
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This chapter is supposed to be glance over the World of Newsgroups and their “inhabitants”; someone who has never dared to go there before will encounter some strange customs, which may give you a feeling of being a lonely alien without backup; but stay calm, it is not like this. The Usenet is a meeting place for all kinds of normal and not-so-normal folks; it is here where they are distributing a lot of information but also gossip and other stuff.
References to more detailed and qualified essays on the Usenet can be found at More Resources
An online-reader connects to a newsserver and gives you access to its content. KNode is an online-reader: you are reading your News and publishing your own articles while the online-reader stays connected.
An offline-reader connects to the Server and fetches only the headers of new articles; then, the connection is closed and you can mark (offline) the articles you are really interested in. When you connect next time the offline-reader fetches the articles you marked and sends the articles you have written whilst offline.
There is no connection while you are reading or writing articles.
You can look at newsgroups as public bulletin boards and forums, where everybody is allowed to participate. Articles you have published in a newsgroup can be read by everybody subscribed to this newsgroup and, normally, everybody is allowed to publish their articles in a newsgroup.
There are lot of different people meeting and talking in newsgroups; it is seen as some kind of courtesy to obey some rules of manner, the basics of which are listed here.
Before you ask questions be sure you have read the newsgroup's FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and didn't find the answer.
If you take part in a discussion be aware of the fact that everybody can read the answer: do not say anything that you would not say to the others if you were facing them; avoid insults.
Try to avoid crossposting: do not ask a question in more than one newsgroup when you do not know which is the right one. Ask in one newsgroup; if it is wrong, you will be told which is right one.
Formulate your articles accurately; nobody likes to read an article with lots of typos, even with content worth a Pulitzer. Think of your articles as letters: your letter speaks for you; it represents you; somebody reading your article will draw conclusions about you from it, wrong or right.
Remember, nobody sees your grin when you are writing an ironic sentence: it may be funny for you, but it can be very serious for the person reading it. It is very difficult to include emotions in an article.
The most important rule: use your common sense when you are answering or publishing an article.
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You will not be surprised about English being the main language on the Usenet; however, there are special trees for German (de.*), French (fr.*) and many other languages. If you are unable to determine the main language of a newsgroup the only possibility is careful listening or a possible explanation in the description of the group in the grouplist.
In addition, over the time the Usenet has developed its own language but it is easy to learn.
When you read news, after some time you will read some strange combinations of letters; for example, you can get a reply like:
RTFM
Nothing else. Strange, but absolutely intended; to solve the riddle: those, most of the time, are shortcuts, acronyms. It is easier to drop some letters than to write the same sentence over and over again.
But what is the meaning of RTFM? The writer is asking you to read the manual, documentation or FAQ before asking questions in the newsgroup. It stands for: (R)ead (T)he (F)...ing (M)anual; BTW this is advice you should adopt.
Wait, what is BTW now? Another often-seen acronym which means (B)y (T)he (W)ay. It is easy when you know it; to avoid you having to continuously speculate over the meaning of acronyms there is table at he end of this section containing the most-often-used acronyms.
This table does not try to be complete and is based on a list by Martin Imlau.
Table 5.1. Acronyms on Usenet
| Acronym | Meaning |
|---|---|
| <g> | grins |
| AAMOF | As a matter of fact |
| ACK | Acknowledge |
| AFAIK | As far as I know |
| AFAIR | As far as I remember |
| AWGTHTGTTA | Are we going to have to go through this again? |
| ASAP | As soon as possible |
| BFN | Bye for now! |
| BTW | By the way |
| BYKT | But you knew that |
| CMIIW | Correct me if I'm wrong |
| CU | See you! |
| CU2 | See you too! |
| CYL | See you later! |
| DAU | German abbreviation for the silliest user you can imagine (DÂümmster anzunehmender User) |
| EOD | End of discussion |
| ESOSL | Endless snorts of stupid laughter |
| FYI | For your information |
| GOK | God only knows |
| HAND | Have a nice day! |
| HTH | Hope that helps |
| HSIK | How should I know? |
| IAE | In any event |
| IANAL | I am not a lawyer |
| IIRC | If I remember correctly |
| IMCO | In my considered opinion |
| IMHO | In my humble opinion |
| IMNSHO | In my not so humble opinion |
| INPO | In no particular order |
| IOW | In other words |
| LMAO | Laughing my ass off |
| LOL | Laughing out loudly |
| NAK | Not acknowledged |
| NBD | No big deal |
| NFW | No f...ing way |
| ROTFL | Rolling on the floor, laughing |
| RTFM | Read the f...ing manual |
| SCNR | Sorry, could not resist |
| TIA | Thanks in advance |
Again, such a strange thing. What is this ;-) meant to be? Turn your head so the left side of your screen is on top; got it? It's a smile with a wink? This is a so-called emoticon; emoticons are an often-used possibility to express emotions, one thing missing in conversation on the Usenet (but there is a substitute, remember? ;-)
It is very difficult to express emotions in email or news; your joking comment appear to be very serious to the recipient and can lead to unmeant reactions or conflicts (flames); so use emoticons to express your intention.
There are a lots of emoticons, which express a great variety of emotions; the interpretation is easy if you turn your head and think of a face.
This PLONK! looks like some comic-sound, does it not? And that is exactly what it is used for. The one who reads it knows he was just added to the killfile of a newsreader; normally this means the recipient of the PLONK! annoyed the sender. The PLONK! is meant to play back the sound of the recipients name hitting the ground in the killfile.
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In this section we will detail some additional information resources which could be useful to you. Many of the articles listed below (for which URLs are given) are posted to news groups regularly; some of those groups are also listed here.
| news.answers |
| news.newusers.questions |
| de.newsusers.infos (German) |
| de.answers (German) |
| de.comp.os.unix.linux.infos (German) |
| de.newusers.answers (German) |
| de.newusers.questions (German) |
For beginners it is especially recommended to read these articles at least partially: informed users have strong advantages in news groups. There are some more-specialized news groups where FAQs and introductory articles are posted frequently, e.g. the newsgroup de.comp.os.unix.linux.infos (German), which contains a lot of useful articles about the Linux® operating system. Just have a look on the group list of your newsserver for it.
The following groups were created especially for testing, i.e. after successfully configuring KNode you should post some articles to those groups to test your settings.
Some groups support automatic replies through email to enable you to test whether your entered identity is correct and mail-replies actually arrive in your mailbox.
In addition, some scripts are offered which check your articles for erroneous settings and generate a followup with useful hints.
| de.test (German test newsgroup) |
| misc.test |
| alt.test |
| alt.test.ignore |
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These URLs are from the corresponding article in the newsgroup de.newusers.infos and have the same contents as the articles posted there.
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If you are interested in further technical information in connection to news, you should not miss the following URLs.
| Header entries: http://www.kirchwitz.de/~amk/dni/headerzeilen (German) |
| A very useful message-ID FAQ: http://www.qad.org/faq/faq-messageid.html |
| A lot of links about newsreaders and related topics: http://www.leafnode.org/links |
| RFCs, Drafts and documents for the technical interested: http://www.landfield.com/usefor/ |
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KNode
Program Copyright 1999,2000,2001,2002 KNode developers
Developers
Christian Gebauer (gebauer AT kde.org)
Christian Thurner (cthurner AT web.de)
Dirk Mueller (mueller AT kde.org)
Mark Mutz (mutz AT kde.org)
Roberto Teixeira (roberto AT kde.org)
Mathias Waack (mathias AT atoll-net.de)
Documentation
Copyright 2000,2001 Stephan Johach(lucardus AT onlinehome.de)
Copyright 2001,2002 Thomas Schütz ( Thomas.Schuetz AT gmx.li)
Andrew Coles(andrew_coles AT yahoo.co.uk)
Thanks go to the KNode developers who answered all my stupid questions with patience. Then Thomas Diehl and Matthias Kiefer who always were competent contacts regards to translation. Many Thanks to Malcolm Hunter who checked this english translation. Not to forget Michael McBride, always there to help me out with documentation-related and general stuff, and everybody else in the KDE Team who contributed to the creation of this document.
This documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
This program is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
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Table of Contents
KNode is part of the KDE project http://www.kde.org/.
KNode can be found in the kdepim package on ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/, the main FTP site of the KDE project.
If you want to successfully install KNode, you need KDE 3.x; if, in addition, you want to use KNode as an offline newsreader, you need a local news server, e.g. leafnode.
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KNode is part of the kdenetwork package of KDE 3.x and is installed together with it, provided you have chosen to install the kdenetwork package; so, in general, there is no need for a user to compile the sources of KNode.
In order to compile and install KNode on your system, type the following in the base directory of the KNode distribution:
%./configure%make%make install
Since KNode uses autoconf and automake you should have no trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the KDE mailing lists.
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This section contains notes about what to take care of when installing a newer version of KNode with an older version already installed.
Since version 0.2 the format of the configuration files and the saved articles has changed, so unfortunately, your old configuration files cannot be imported.
If you update from a version >= 0.4 the local folders will automatically be converted into the new format; you will then be unable to use the data with an older version of KNode any more.
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To delete one of your articles from the newsserver: the newsreader generates a special control message to tell the server to delete this article.
The posting of an article in several newsgroups; this is very often disliked, because it disturbs the topic-oriented association of the newsgroups.
GNKSA is a kind of seal-of-approval for newsreaders; you can get more information at http://www.gnksa.org.
Somebody who is new somewhere, in relationship to usenet: somebody who is new to the newsgroup, or new to usenet in general.
A kind-of bulletin board in the usenet about a special topic or a group of topics. This is where you post your articles.
A program for reading and writing news.
Network News Transport Protocol; this is the protocol which defines how the articles in the usenet are spread.
A kind-of address for the application to listen for data on and for connecting to another computer; the standard-port for the connection between the newsreader and the newsserver is 119.
A digital signature; you can use it to determine whether the document has been changed since it was signed or if it is the original text from the author.
Either an article which is sent to usenet or the act of sending itself; you are “posting” an article into a newsgroup.
This is the valuation of an article or a thread.
A signature is a personal sign of the author which is attached at the end of the normal contents of the article; it is like a visiting card — very often there are e-mail addresses, a homepage URL or other personal data. The signature should not be longer than 4 lines. Note that the signature should not be mixed up with the PGP-signature.
This is the overwriting of an existing article: the newsreader generates a special article with a control message in the header which tells the newsserver to overwrite the existing article with this one.
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