Download Strategies

People who frequent USENET tend to fall into one of two camps: those who like to download headers and bodies for all articles and those who like to download just the headers and then pick and choose which article bodies they want. At the moment Pineapple News is better optimized for the first case but both are possible. You can probably guess which camp I fall into.


Downloading full article bodies

To get full articles for a newsgroup make sure its download type is set to Headers and Bodies. You can do this by right-clicking on the icon for the newsgroup in question and picking the setting you want. The icon should be a newspaper with a filled red arrow. Then you can double-click on the newsgroup to initiate a download or else select the Transfer menu, then Download, then Newsgroup. You don't have to do anything else but wait for the articles to arrive and then read them.


Downloading headers and getting the bodies later

Make sure the newsgroup in question is set for Download Headers by right-clicking on its icon and selecting the proper option. Its icon should be a newspaper with a hollow red arrow. Double-click on the newsgroup to initiate a download, which will start the headers streaming in.

Based on a message header's subject, author, and so on you can decide whether to download it or not. The most direct route is to double-click on the header which will add an action to the request list to get this article's body. Alternately you can right-click on the header to get the context menu and select Mark for download. The header's icon should change to include a red arrow, meaning it is now marked for download.

Once you've marked a bunch of messages for download you can retrieve them by selecting the Transfer menu, then Download Marked. That will get you a sub-menu with three different download types: get marked messages for this newsgroup, get all marked messages for this server, and get all marked messages for all servers.

It would be nice if you could select several articles at once using the usual BeOS methods (shift-click, drag-select, and so on) and mark them all for download. Perhaps I will live long enough to finally implement something like that. And perhaps I will not.


Limiting the number of headers or articles downloaded

By default the program limits the number of headers and articles downloaded to 300 of either, then it stops and goes on to the next action. You can modify this behavior by changing the PineappleNews.ini values DownloadLimit, DownloadHeaders, and DownloadArticles. For more information on editing this file see the help topic PineappleNews.ini Reference.


Catching up

When you first subscribe to a newsgroup sometimes you don't want to spend time downloading or reading the possibly thousands of messages that are already in the group, you just want to see whatever is posted there from now on. That's what the Catch-up function is for. It updates the saved state data for a newsgroup to make it look like you've already downloaded every article that currently exists in the group. Then you can come back to the group the next day, download it normally, and see only what's been posted in the last 24 hours. On the Transfer menu you can find a sub-menu called Catch-up that has options to catch up the current newsgroup, all newsgroups on the current server, or all servers. You can also find this command on the right-click context menu of servers and newsgroups.


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