Re: What is the best way to add a newsgroup?

The Horny Goat <[email protected]> wrote:

> So what's your software of choice for this purpose? (I use Agent
> primarily for binaries but it does a fairly decent job on text groups)

I quit doing binaries probably around 25+ years ago, but back then I
used a client that was purposely designed to reconstruct binaries across
multiple posts (i.e., Newsbin, Newsrover).  For a couple decades, there
has not been much left in Usenet for binaries that cannot be found on
the Web.  I was never much into stealing stuff, or blue content.

I went through many trials of multiple NNTP clients.  I had passed on my
current one (40tude Dialog) in every trial until the last trial when I
then discovered its UI could be tailored to my needs, and event
triggered scripts could be used to add features that I wanted in other
NNTP clients.  Only when I decided to expend the effort to learn the
deep features of the NNTP client did I realize it surpassed the other
choices.  Back then there was a Dialog lib website of scripts that you
could either use as-is, or try to adapt to your own purpose.  For
awhile, Bernd was around to help with writing scripts since he knew
Object Pascal, and knew the scope of many variables that were usable
within scripts; however, there was no documentation, so I gave up on
trying to guess what some unknown vars would have scope within the
scripts.  I wasn't interested in becoming intimate with the code for the
program.  I did install a 2005 update, but it caused problems, so I
reverted back to the 2002 version of its executables.  So, the NNTP
client that I chose to use, and have stuck with, is 24 years old, and
definitely abandonware.  No one knows for sure what happened to Dialog's
author, but some surmised he died.

The last version of Agent that I remember using was probably 3.3 which
was free.  Back then I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to
define filters.  Folks in the Agent newsgroup told me that I could
define searches, but that sucked because I would have to run them
myself.  The paid version wasn't any better, so I wasn't going to pay
for something not better.  Eventually I heard Agent added filters that
would automatically execute, but I gave up on it long ago.  Dialog did
what I needed, its UI was customizable, and event scripts added all the
features that were missing in Agent or Thunderbird.

In each of the last 6 trials of multiple NNTP clients, Thunderbird was
included; however, each time I ran into reliability or usability issues
with it.  The last trial of Tbird lasted 6 months before I couldn't
stand using it anymore as an NNTP client.  That was over 3 years ago.

The use of regex in filters, and testing on ANY header, kept me using
Dialog.  Plus I can test on multiple headers, like AND'ing or OR'ing
them together to make for some robust regex filtering that attempts to
reduce any false positives.  To get all headers (instead of just the
overview headers) requires I download full messages.  That's okay in
text-only newsgroups, because they are very quick to download.  Wouldn't
work if I was downloading binaries because of the severely longer
download times.  Luckily I long ago gave up on bothering with any binary
content in Usenet, visit text-only newsgroups, and downloading full text
articles is very quick (except perhaps the first time I subscribe to a
newsgroup that is very busy, and has tons of articles to retrieve).

If Agent does everything you need, there's no reason to leave it.