Aihuxs.122
net.news
utzoo!decvax!harpo!ihnss!ihuxs!steffen
Thu May  6 13:48:30 1982
Getting started on netnews

(I haven't been reading net.news, so I hope this hasn't been already
discussed).

Whenever anyone asks me how to use netnews I sigh in dispair because I know
I will spend 10 minutes explaining how read all the news initially, figure
out what groups to subscribe to, and finallow how to add the subscription
list to the .newsrc file.  After this I often get a look that means "Well
thanks, but if it's that complicated I won't bother."  Netnews is easy to
use once your subscription list is set up, but doing this is a real bother.

To solve this, I seek two improvements to the netnews user interface.  The
first is a "newsgroups" command that lists the basename of the all the news
group directories that have been modified in the last 30 days.  This will
give a list of the active news groups.

The second improvement involves adding subscribe/unsubscribe subcommands to
readnews, and making the default for -n be "all".  Then the new user can
enter readnews without any arguments, and just unsubscribe and skip to the
next newsgroup by entering U.  You would resubscribe to a group by entering 
S <newsgroup>.

				Joe Steffen
				Bell Labs, Indian Hill
				(312) 979-5381
				UUCPnet: ucbvax!ihnss!ihuxs!steffen