Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: basic questions
Keywords: articles, newsgroups, foolish questions
Message-ID: <1989Jul31.051657.14261@twwells.com>
Date: 31 Jul 89 05:16:57 GMT
References: <758@soleil.UUCP>
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 116

In article <758@soleil.UUCP> eam@soleil.UUCP (Ed A. Mills) writes:
: My usual method of learning new software is to fool aruond with it until
: I figure it out.  Well, this isn't working with "vnews", so maybe some of
: you experts could give me a few pointers.  Please respond to each question
: briefly and seperately.

I don't know beans about vnews, but some of the questions aren't
related to it; I'll answer those.

: 1.  what is uunet?  how about usenet?  is vnews a subset of these things,
:     or do they exist just for vnews?

Uunet is the name of a well-known uucp (among other things) site;
they provide uucp connections and other services for a fee and are a
non-profit organization. For more information about them, you can
send a message to uunet!postmaster.

Usenet is just the collection of sites that carry the news.

The news is not a centralized database; rather, each message that is
posted goes to every site that is in Usenet. (There are exceptions:
posting a message to a moderated newsgroup, if it works at all, will
get the message e-mailed to the moderator; certain systems provide a
centralized news server for a group of systems, etc.) Vnews is just a
program that accesses the news database on your system (or its
server, maybe).

: 3.  Is there a newsgroup for instructions?  man vnews is the usual cryptic
:     unix drivel.

There is a newsgroup for information that is useful to all news users:
news.announce.newusers; you really should read the messages in that
newsgroup if you haven't already. If there are no messages in it,
wait for a while; they are reposted periodically.

Depending on the question, you might try any of news.software.b,
comp.sources.d, and comp.misc.

: 6.  What does the .newsrc file in my directory do?  What do the numbers
:     mean after the newsgroups?  What do the !'s mean?  If I edit this
:     file, does it change how vnews starts up?

The .newsrc file contains a record of what you have read so far. The
`!' means that you are not subscribed to the newsgroup. The numbers
after the `:' or `!' are the article numbers of the articles you have
already read. Yes, you can edit this file: caveat usor!

: 8.  Is there a way to order the groups as I please?  Maybe by rearranging
:     the .newsrc file mentioned above?

If anything will do it, reordering your .newsrc will.

: 10. What's the beef with hierarchies?  For example, in
:     vegtables.green.good-tasting.nutritious.beans are there certain
:     terms for each of the levels?

All of vegtables, vegtables.green, vegtables.green.good-tasting. and
vegtables.green.good-tasting.nutritious are newsgroup hierarchies;
vegtables.green.good-tasting.nutritious.beans is a newsgroup.

:                                    Would this be newsgroup vegtables,
:     subgroup green, and so on... or what?  Is there a way to get a list
:     of a hierarchy under each level (kind of like cd vegtables.green;ls)?

There is a file, ask your system administrator where, that contains
the names of all newsgroups that the system receives. You can fiddle
with a copy of that to get what you want. It may be the case that
vnews keeps your .newsrc consistent with that file, in which case you
can just look at it.

: 11. Are there other newsgroups that have to be added or accessed specially
:     by request?  Are there other nets with entirely new groups?  If so,
:     how can I find out what they are and how to access them?

There are many hierarchies that are available only if your
administrator specifically asks for them. Information about these is
posted periodically, I think in news.lists.

: 14. What are moderated groups?  Who modertates them?   Are postings
:     postponed until the moderator decides to include them, or are
:     they included but later deleted if he(she) decides he(she) doesn't
:     like them?

A moderated group is one where only the moderator (or moderators) is
allowed to post. Depending on how old your news software is, posting
to a moderated newsgroup will either get your posting rejected or
will get it mailed to the moderator; if you have the older software,
you have to mail to the moderator yourself. The moderator himself
posts the message. BTW, cross-posting to a set of newsgroups that
includes a moderated newsgroup will get message mailed to the
moderator; it will not get posted.

As to who moderates them; that gets posted periodically, along with
where to mail messages to him if you want to. (Also in news.lists? I
let those go by with glazed eyes and I've forgotten where I see them!
:-)

: 15. If I postnews to a non-existent group, will it be created?

No. (I hope! It certainly won't on all the systems I'm familiar with.)

: 16. Can I 'unpost' an article that I posted?  I tried this once, but it
:     said I didn't own it, even though I had just posted it.

That ought to work; however, I've never had any luck doing it.

: 17. Where and what is the host system for vnews?  If distributed, does
:     each system with access serve part of the groups?

There is no host system (unless your organization provides a server);
each system contains a complete copy of whatever is made available on
that system.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com