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Simple NEWS 1.91 ================ August 25, 1993 by John McCombs Modified by Michael Studte, John Dennis, Kai Uwe Rommel and Daniel Fandrich INTRODUCTION ============ 'Simple NEWS' is an news add-on for UUPC. It is designed to handle Usenet news as a leaf node, and offers: - Threaded news reading. This allows you to be much more selective about what you read, enabling you to cover many more newsgroups. - When a cross-posted article is read, the news-reader marks all the other instances of the article as read, too. - Separate rc files are kept for each user which record the individual articles that you have seen. This is in contrast to some readers which simply record the highest article number read. - Usual range of response facilities: follow-up news, reply by mail, forward by mail, save article/thread to disk. - The extract function (key "w") saves articles to a user-specified file in the UUPC mailbox format (with a header of 20 hex 01's). Thus, extracted news articles can be read with the mail program later, at the user's convenience. - Built-in support for ISO 8859/1/2/3/4/9 character sets (RFC 1341 and RFC 1342) and a single key interface to the metamail MIME decoder (or other user-specified program). - Article storage in two files per newsgroup, rather than one file per article. This results in an enormous saving (up to 3:1) in disk space on disks with a default cluster size of 4 KB per cluster. - Processing of batched compressed or uncompressed news. Control messages are not processed. - Duplicate cross-posted articles are killed during the unbatch stage. - Post articles are unbatched and uncompressed. You can only post to your 'mailserv' -- you cannot feed another site. Posting can only be done from within the news reader SNews. - 'Received date' oriented expire to maintain the news database. - Works with UUPC/extended 1.11n or greater. I looked at porting Tass and wnews, but in the end decided they were far more effort than it was worth, as these news systems were more complicated than was necessary for a single user (at a time) DOS implementation, especially when the PC is likely to be a leaf node. Generally, the algorithms used are simple, but the speed is adequate for a feed for several users expiring after 5-10 days. The main bottleneck occurs during the 'expire' operation, which must rewrite the entire news database. 'Simple NEWS' was built rather quickly (and it shows in places :-) to suit my own needs. I'm distributing it in the hope you might find it useful. [jm] [Posting is a bit of a kludge. The D... and X... files are created, then queued using the UUCP program. If you look in the source code you will see this is all a bit dodgy. I should sort this out some time. I've tested it by posting to a Waffle system which isn't all that fussy, and by posting to a CNEWS/Unix SYSV system, which is rather particular]. System Requirements ------------------- - A minimum of PC-XT with 120k free RAM running under MS-DOS 2.0 or newer (has been tested on versions 3.3 and newer). The unbatch program requires much more free RAM if it invokes uncompress on the received batches (i.e. not UUPC/extended ver. 1.11x). If you use a lot of TSR's, you could get around this by having your feed use 12 bit compression instead of the default 16 bit. - 200k disk space for the program files plus several megabytes for the newsbase, depending on size of the feed. - You must have installed UUPC/extended and the optional program, UUCP in particular. UUPC/extended version 1.11n and on should work. You do not need any UUPC sources to build Simple NEWS. The SNews newsreader can be used by multiple users to read news on a network if the following conditions are met: TempDir is different for each computer, articles are not posted simultaneously to the same group by more than one user, and the newsbase manipulation commands unbatch.exe, expire.exe and rmgroup.exe are only run when no other programs are using the newsbase. The sources have been compiled with Borland's TC ver. 2.0 and BC++. Porting to other MS-DOS ANSI C compilers should be relatively easy. [Known non-ANSI functions include Borland's console I/O routines, and the intdos() function]. Support for OS/2 has been added to this version of SNews on an experimental basis. Although it appears to be stable, it has not yet been as thoroughly tested as the MS-DOS version, so please report any problems you have to the author. Introduction to Version 1.91 ---------------------------- This is an updated version of SNews version 1.90 for MS-DOS. Two derivatives of older versions of SNews are available: for OS/2 (SNews/2 ver. 2.0), and for running under KA9Q NOS (SNews ver. 1.21). The OS/2 version is a "bound" executable and should work under MS-DOS as well. Please see the section at the end of this file "MAJOR CHANGES TO SNEWS 1.91" for specific information that differs from previous versions of SNews. Support ------- I don't want to be *deluged* with complaints, bug reports, or suggestions for improvements. I can think of enough of these for myself, :-). And no whining about the dodgy processing of the headers. This will be fixed sometime. If you have a problem, please try hard to solve it before you contact me. If you find a bug let me know. Unless a bug absolutely cripples you, you'll have to wait for the next release. This policy arises largely out of the fact that email costs me $$$. [jm] When contacting the author(s) with a problem, contact the last author mentioned for whichever version of SNews you are using. The original author cannot be responsible for changes made by a third party (and, according to the license, cannot be held responsible for an unchanged version, either). [df] CAVEATS AND COPYRIGHT ===================== Version 1.12 of this software is copyright (1991) by John McCombs, Christchurch, New Zealand <john@ahuriri.gen.nz> Version 1.90 is copyright 1992 by Michael Studte/John Dennis (Shinohara Industries) Version 1.91 is copyright 1993 by Daniel Fandrich <dan@fch.wimsey.bc.ca> or <72365.306@compuserve.com> (some portions are copyright 1992 by Kai Uwe Rommel <rommel@jonas.bofe.sub.org> or <rommel@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>, and copyright 1985, 1989 by Bill Davidsen) This package is free software, but NOT public domain; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 1, as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. See the file COPYING, which contains a copy of the GNU General Public License. The compress program and documentation included with the SNews distribution were not written by the SNews authors and are not a formal part of SNews. The are part of the public domain compress ported by Donald J. Gloistein. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS =============== I'd like to thank Steve Kohlenberger, of PreSoft Architects, for making suggestions and doing some testing for me. [jm] Version 1.90 Acknowledgements ----------------------------- First of all, thanks to John McCombs for allowing us to modify his code. A great little program that we hope to make just a touch better. To all people who made suggestions and bug reports up to this point, you guys are too numerous to mention. Thanks one and all. [ms/jd] Version 1.91 Acknowledgements ----------------------------- Thanks to Kai Uwe Rommel for his SNews/2 bug fixes, to Thomas Oeser and Kosta Kostis for their ISO 8859/X character maps, to W. John Guineau for beta-testing this version under Windows, to Eric Trepanier for the OS/2 modifications, and to Mike McLagan and the snews-dev-l mailing list folks for suggestions and feedback. [df] INSTALLATION ============ 1. First get UUPC/extended going and delivering news batches into the 'incoming' directory. The name of this directory is set in the UUPC.RC file using the 'NewsDir' variable. The incoming directory *must* be reserved solely for this purpose, and it must have no files in it other than the news batches that 'uuxqt' will create there. SNews requires that your UUPC.RC or PERSONAL.RC files contain the following items (see the FILES AND DIRECTORIES section below for information on setting them): MailServ, NodeName, Domain, NewsDir, MailBox, Name, Home. 2. Put "set UUPCNEWS=c:\uucp\news" in your autoexec.bat. This is the 'root' directory for your news system. The news control files are placed here and the news database is a subdirectory of this directory. UUPCNEWS must be *different* from the 'NewsDir' specified in the UUPC.RC file. 3. Create the SNEWS.RC file in your home directory (the one where PERSONAL.RC is located). This can be easily done by copying the file PERSONAL.RC to SNEWS.RC or by manually creating one. SNEWS.RC has been separately created to accommodate the new variables that can be set for SNews, and should be pointed to by the SNEWSRC environment variable. It is possible to use your PERSONAL.RC file instead, pointed to by UUPCUSRRC as per the UUPC standard, but UUPC will complain about the presence of any of SNews' extended variables (marked + in the list below) (although it will work correctly). A sample SNEWS.RC file is included. (See it for more documentation on how to customise SNews.) 4. Create the 'active' file in this directory, using 'addgroup'. For example: addgroup alt.sources comp.sys.ibm.pc -m comp.risks This initializes three groups in your newsbase. ADDGROUP could be run from a batch file so that you can easily re-initialise the news system, should the need ever arise. An example 'active.bat' file is included. 5. Put the .exe files into a directory in the DOS PATH. The compress.exe program is not a formal part of SNews, and can be replaced by any Unix-compatible uncompress program. The OS/2 version also requires the file C2.DLL, which should be put into the directory specified by the LIBPATH environment variable. 6. Call your host and get some news. Copy some of these batches into another directory so that you can use them again for testing purposes. Run 'unbatch'. This is where most problems occur. Check the following: - That your news disk is not full. - That the 'TempDir' directory specified in the UUPC.RC file exists. Check that there is also room on this drive; to uncompress large batches, you could need up to 1 MB free space. - Before the unbatch there should be some files with names like '290f8f99.001'. These are the news batches. - Dump the first part of one of these batches. The file should start with '#! cunbatch'. If it doesn't, check that your host is sending compressed, batched news to you. - Run 'unbatch -n'. The -n switch tells unbatch to feed the first batch to compress and then stop. If you look in TempDir you should see the file '$unbatch', which is the uncompressed version of the first news batch. If the uncompress fails, check that you are using the compress.exe supplied with Simple NEWS. If you have another compress.exe, make sure the SNews one is first on the DOS PATH. Compress is run with the command line 'compress -d $unbatch.z', and it must *not* convert Unix type linefeeds to DOS style cr/lf. Look in '$unbatch' with an editor. You should see news articles separated by the string '#rnews <number>'. 7. Modify UUIO.BAT putting "unbatch" after the last line of the file. Once you have done this, you should have your batches processed automatically after transfer. Use SNews to read your news, and run expire once in a while to deleted the old stuff. You could stick the expire in your autoexec file. FILES AND DIRECTORIES ===================== Executable Directory -------------------- SNews' program files can be placed in any directory that is included in the PATH statement. Normally, they are put into the same directory as the UUPC/extended programs. Programs which are part of SNews are unbatch.exe, snews.exe, expire.exe, addgroup.exe and rmgroup.exe. compress.exe is also required, but is not a formal part of SNews. News Directory -------------- This is the top level directory for Simple NEWS where the news control files are kept, and the parent of the newsbase directory. This directory is defined by the environment variable UUPCNEWS. HISTORY - The history file contains a list of the message-id's of all the cross-posted articles in the database. It is used by the news-reader to find all the instances of a cross-posted article, and by unbatch to kill duplicate cross-posted articles. The file fields are message-id, received date in seconds (Unix date), and the newsgroup name & article number for each instance of the article. The history entries are added by 'unbatch' and deleted by 'expire'. The history file is located in the news base directory. ACTIVE - The active file contains a list of the newsgroups we expect to get. All incoming articles to newsgroups not defined in the active file are posted to junk. You should use 'addgroup' and 'rmgroup' to maintain the active file to guarantee the validity of the newsbase -- using an editor on the active file risks destroying your news structure. Each entry in the active file has form of "alt.sources 87297268 00000000 00000000 y". The first number is the filename of the file where the articles are stored. The next two numbers are the lowest article number (minus 1) and the highest article number, respectively. The three numbers MUST be EXACTLY 8 digits long with EXACTLY one space between them. The last field is the posting status of the group. If you can post to the group, it is y; if not, n. If the group is moderated, it is m (and is currently treated as n by SNews). The active file is located in the news base directory. POST.LOG - This file, which is in the news base directory, is a log of all postings. You can read this file with 'mail' using the -f option. The posting log file is located in the news base directory. Incoming News Batch Directory ----------------------------- Newsbatches are placed by UUPC's rnews program into the directory defined by the 'NewsDir' UUPC.RC variable. Unbatch processes the batches from this directory, and deletes them when done. The incoming directory is often a subdirectory of the news directory. News Base Directory ------------------- This directory is always called NEWSBASE and is located off the news directory. It contains the files containing the actual articles and their corresponding index files. ARTICLES - There is one text file and one index file for each newsgroup. The name of the text file is found in the second field of the corresponding entry in the active file. For example, if the news base directory is d:\uucp\news then articles in comp.sys.ibm.pc might be in a file called: d:\uucp\news\newsbase\87297243 and the index file will be: d:\uucp\news\newsbase\87297243.IDX Don't change these files by hand - use 'expire' to do the deletion to keep the active file in sync. Use 'addgroup' to create them and 'rmgroup' to remove them. INDEX FILES - Each newsgroup has an index file which has information about the articles in that newsgroup. The format is 00000000 00000001 687297893 Re: senior (humph!) 00001927 00000002 687297893 need rx02 controller. 00002801 00000003 687297893 Re: senior (humph!) 00003707 00000004 687297893 Another dumb luser story The first field is the offset of the article in the text file. The second field is the article number. The third field is the date/time that the article was added to the database (in Unix format), and the fourth field is the article subject. This latter field is used by the newsreader to build the threads. User Home Directory ------------------- This directory contains files which can be different for different users. It is specified by the 'Home' variable in the SNEWS.RC or PERSONAL.RC file, which in turn is specified with the SNEWSRC or UUPCUSRRC environment variable. SNEWS.NRC - This file has a list of the articles which a user has seen. Each user has his own SNEWS.NRC file which is located in the user's home directory. The nrc files are created and maintained automatically by the news reader and should not be edited by hand. If one becomes corrupted, just delete it. ALIASES - To keep track of users you mail often, you can give them nicknames which are expanded to their full email addresses. These aliases are located in the file specified by the 'Aliases=', which specifies one alias per line. For example: joe "Joe Blo" <joseph@mcmurdo.aq> Mail or articles forwarded to the user "joe" would actually be sent to joseph@mcmurdo.aq. SIGNATURE - Each article you write can have a few lines of identifying information appended -- the signature (or .signature) file. It is specified by the 'Signature=' configuration variable. UUPC.RC, PERSONAL.RC - These file contain the information specific to your SNews setup, and are also required for UUPC/extended. All the variables required by SNews are normally specified as part of the UUPC/extended installation, and need not be changed for SNews (see the UUPC/extended documentation to set up these variables for UUPC's use). The required variables in the UUPC.RC file are: MailServ=bighost - uucp name of your news feed host NodeName=mymachine - your local uucp name Domain=mymachine.bighost.com - your local domain name NewsDir=c:\uucp\news\incoming - where batches of news are deposited by 'uuxqt' (where 'unbatch' looks for work) The required variables in the PERSONAL.RC file are: Mailbox=joe - Your "account name" (your mailbox name) Name=Joe Bloggs - Your "real" name Home=d:/usr/joe - Personal "home" directory Optional variables are: TempDir=c:/temp/ - Directory to place temporary files If not found, TempDir is set to the environment variable TEMP or TMP, and defaults to the current directory. Signature=sig - Signature file (in home directory) Aliases=d:/uupc/aliases.txt - full path to alias file, which is a UUPC mail style alias file. Organization=This here Company Ltd. - Your company or organization's name to appear in posted articles. Replyto=whoami@this.system - A Reply-To address that will be included in posted article headers. Editor=q %s - Editor to be used for entering articles. %s is replaced by the file name to edit. If not found, Editor is set to the environment variable EDITOR, and defaults to edit %s Uncompress=uncompress %s - Program to use to decompress a compressed news batch. %s is replaced by the file name to uncompress. This variable defaults to compress -d %s + HotPipe=metamail %s - Program to run when F4 is pressed. The %s parameter, if present, is changed to the temporary file name containing the current article. If no %s is present, the article is piped into the program's standard input. Normally used to decode MIME articles by piping them through metamail, this could also be used to uudecode articles (uudecode -i), print articles (cat >prn) or many other uses. This variable defaults to metamail %s + Extract=~/extract.mbo - File in which to place articles extracted with 'w' command. Articles are saved in mailbox format for reading with mail -f extract.mbo. This variable defaults to extract.nws in the current directory. The following colour variables define the look of your system, and allow people on monochrome systems to define the screen output differently from colour-screen users. + colorhelpf=<col> - Help screen foreground + colorhelpb=<col> - Help screen background + colortextf=<col> - Text window foreground + colortextb=<col> - Text window background + colorheadb=<col> - Screen header background + colorheadf=<col> - Screen header foreground + colormsgb=<col> - Message line (bottom) background + colormsgf=<col> - Message line foreground <col> can be of the following colours: whi - grey note: the shortened names do not have bla - black to be used - only the first 3 blu - blue letters of the colour are gre - green significant red - red mag - magenta cya - cyan yel - yellow add "+" to the end of these and you will get the high intensity version of the same colour. e.g. whi+ = white cya+ = light cyan and so on. Fiddle round with it till you get the colours you want. SNEWS - NEWS READER =================== SNews is a threaded news reader, somewhat reminiscent of Tass. The display has three levels: choose a newsgroup, choose a thread, and read an article. At each level, the Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/UpArr/DnArr can be used to move around. ENTER selects whatever you are pointing at, and TAB moves you to the next unread group/article. To read the all of a thread (read and unread) keep hitting ENTER. ESCAPE takes you back a level. 'h' or F1 invokes a help screen, 'c' marks all articles in a group as read. 'p' posts an article from any level. '!' starts a command-line shell to let you execute DOS commands (type EXIT to return to SNews). F2 displays the values set via the SNEWS.RC file. 'x' toggles a rot13 conversion of the article. PgUp from the start of the article will display all the headers. Holding the control key down while pressing the left or right arrows skips 9 articles and places you on the 10th article. The '/' key starts a case-insensitive text search from the current cursor position to the end of data. From the group or thread selection levels, the group or thread name only is searched. From the article display level, the article body text is searched. A search which finds no matches places the cursor at the end of available data. [Several keys used in the trn newsreader work to shadow SNews' own commands. This makes switching to SNews from trn/rn somewhat easier. Note that these keys must be considered undocumented, and may change in future versions!] If an article has a MIME Content-Type header line, SNews will look for a charset= parameter and display the article with that character set, if supported. Currently, those include US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 through ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-9, and X-IBM-CP-437; the current character set can be changed to the next in the series by pressing 'F3'. From: and Subject: header lines conforming to RFC-1342 will also be displayed with the defined character set (if supported). The characters displayed will match the desired character as closely as possible using the glyphs available in the current code page. Code pages supported are 437 (standard IBM PC) and 850 (Multilingual/Latin I) -- press 'F2' to see the current code page and character set. If a symbol is not defined in the current code page, the closest appropriate one will be substituted. If no symbols are appropriate in context, a question mark '?' is displayed instead. Only Content-Type text/plain with Content-Transfer-Encoding type 7bit or 8bit are currently supported. Other MIME types can be decoded by pressing the 'F4' key to invoke metamail or whichever program has been set up by the HotPipe config variable. SNews maintains a list in the user's .nrc file of which articles have been seen. This file is called SNEWS.NRC and is located in the user's home directory. In the group and thread levels, the number of unread articles, if any, is displayed, followed by the total number of articles, in brackets, for each group/thread. The threads are constructed in the order that the articles were unbatched which is usually pretty close to the chronological order. SNews allows stepping forward and backward through articles with the arrow keys. The right arrow key will take you to the next article in the current thread, while the left arrow takes you to the previous article. When you read a cross-posted article, all the other instances of that article in the other newsgroups are also marked as read. This saves you having to sort out which articles you have previously seen. If you use 'c' to mark all the articles in a group as read, the instances of cross-posted articles in other groups are *not* marked. Free memory is shown in [] at the top of each page. Since each article must be read into memory before it can be displayed, this figure give a rough indication of the longest article that can be read. Allow 100k per 1 000 article lines. Posting ------- You can only post to newsgroups with a 'y' in the posting status column of the active file, which is set using the addgroup program. This is a suitable way to prevent posts to a moderated group (to which articles must be mailed instead of posted). When following up an article, SNews will eliminate cross-posted groups and will send the article in the current group only. Cross-posted group names entered manually must all exist in the active file, and must have posting permission set to 'y'. Your signature file (if specified) is added to the end of your article before the editor is started. Replying to an article (via mail) does not append the signature, as uupc's mail command will add it (if the autosig option is set). MIME headers are not added to articles sent. Adding or changing article headers is not currently possible. A copy of each post is saved in a file called 'post.log' in the news base directory. This file may be perused using mail, with a command like mail -f \uucp\news\post.log When reading an article, 'r' and 'f' allow a mail reply and a news follow-up of the current article, respectively. You are given the option of quoting the article. A limitation causes unreliable results when the mailed message Subject: contains a double quote ("). UNBATCH ======= Just run it. It looks for work in the UUPC.RC NewsDir directory, and tosses the articles into the files defined in the active file. News batches are removed as they are successfully processed. The "-n" option causes the program to halt after uncompressing the first batch, without unbatching it. The uncompressed file remains in the temp directory. This switch is helpful in tracing unpacking problems. The "-x n" option sets the debug level to n (between 0 and 2). Higher numbers display more information about the unbatching process. COMPRESS.EXE must be on the PATH unless the Uncompress= variable is set in the config file. Unbatch requires around 500k of free memory for the uncompress of 16 bit news batches. If Ctrl-Break is pressed while unbatch is running, execution is halted at the end of the current batch (which, depending on its size, could be a while). EXPIRE ====== Expire takes at least two arguments: the number of days preceded by a dash, and the groups to expire. For instance: expire -5 rec.* *.sources.* will delete articles 5 days or older from all rec and sources groups in the news base. The group names are matched based on *nix 'sh' pattern matching rules, which include ? to match one character, * to match as many characters as necessary, and [] to match any one of the characters between the brackets. If no newsgroup name is given, all newsgroups in the active file will be expired. An alternate form of the expire command is shown in this example: expire -e 5 -n rec.* *.sources.* This form is similar to that used by the expire included with UUPC/extended's news support. The -e specifies the number of days before which articles will be expired, and the -n indicates a newsgroup name follows. Expire will not run without correctly-formatted command-line arguments, to avoid accidentally expiring your newsbase. Be sure to specify a group name, though, or expire will affect every group. Expire will give you a summary of the number of articles and size of the remaining news database, and of the articles deleted. ADDGROUP ======== The 'addgroup' utility is used to create or add groups to the active file. For example: addgroup alt.sources comp.sys.ibm.pc -m comp.risks will add three groups, creating an new active file if none exists. The newsgroup files in the 'newsbase' directory are also created. The first two groups (alt.sources and comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc) are unmoderated groups. The last (comp.risks) is a moderated group, specified by -m before the name. Other switches include -y (the default) for a normal, unmoderated which you are allowed to post to, and -n for a group to which you are not allowed to post. Local groups (those to which articles are not forwarded to the host) can be specified using the -l switch. The default is -r (remote). A switch applies to all groups following it, until another switch is encountered which specifies a new value. RMGROUP ======= To remove a newsgroup, simply run rmgroup, followed by the newsgroup names. For example: rmgroup alt.sources comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc comp.sys.ibm.pc This will remove the files and delete the entry from the active file. COMPRESS ======== Since a news feed is normally compressed before transmission to save downloading time, a Unix-compatible uncompress program is required to uncompress each batch. The -d switch causes compress.exe to uncompress a file, and is used by default in unbatch to uncompress news. The program used to uncompress can be changed using the Uncompress= variable in one of the config files. The compress program and its documentation (compress.exe and compress.doc) included with the SNews distribution are not a formal part of SNews. They are included since they are inevitably needed, and constitute a nice, public domain version of Unix compress. If you are interested in the workings of compress, see the documentation file compress.doc. HELP! ===== Here are some hints to keep in mind if a problem occurs: You should not edit/delete the active file or the news database files by hand. Use only addgroup/rmgroup/unbatch/expire for these tasks. The history and *.nrc files should not be edited by hand, but deleting them is not fatal. If they get corrupted, just delete them. The active file, article text files and index files are all checked to ensure that they stay in sync. If something gets corrupted, you will probably see the message "snews: article xxx found when yyy expected". You can probably fix the problem by using rmgroup to delete the affected group, then using addgroup to put it back. The most likely cause of this problem is 'unbatch' or 'expire' crashing. If things get really messed up your only option may be to re-init the news system by deleting all news-related files and starting anew. You may only post to groups with a 'y' in the last column of the active file. To post to a moderated group, find the email address for article submissions and use UUPC's mail command to send your article. All SNews programs respond to '-?', '/?' and '/help' command line switches by displaying a short description of allowed options. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- MAJOR CHANGES TO SNEWS 1.91 =========================== The most significant changes from SNews version 1.90 are listed here. For a detailed list, see the file CHANGES included with the SNews source code archive. To upgrade to version 1.91 from a previous version, see the file UPGRADE.DOC. - User's .NRC file is now called SNEWS.NRC and is located in the user's home directory instead of the news directory - Color commands have been changed to conform to UUPC's config file format. e.g. color msgf blu becomes: colormsgf=blu - Eliminated the need for the NG file completely. Now, postable groups are specified on the addgroup command line, and is stored in the active file. `y' means you can post to the group, `n' means you can't, `m' means the group is moderated. `m' is currently not implemented anywhere and is treated as 'n'. - Added ISO-8859-1 (and other) character set support for code pages 437 (default IBM PC) and 850 (multilingual) while displaying article headers (RFC 1342) and article bodies with Content-Type: text/plain (part of MIME, RFC 1341) - Periodic program hangup bugs fixed - Fixed a bug in unbatch which caused all cross-posted articles to nonexistent groups to be junked, even when one group exists. - Added duplicate cross-posted article deletion in unbatch. - -- Good luck and may the News be with you!