Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet by Electronic Frontier Foundation (early reader chapter books .txt) 📕

Un-subscribe from the current newsgroup.

R Responds to an article via e-mail.

space Hitting the space bar brings up the next page of articles.

X If you have selected articles, this will show them to you

and then take you to the next subscribed newsgroup with

unread articles. If you don’t have any selected articles,

it marks all articles as read and takes you to the next

unread subscribed newsgroup.

=word Finds and marks all articles in the newsgroup with a

specific word in the “subject:” line, for example:

=modem

Z Shows you selected articles immediately and then returns

you to the current newsgroup.

? Brings up a help screen.

< Goes to the previous page in the newsgroup.

> Goes to the next page in the newsgroup.

$ Goes to the last page in an article.

^ Goes to the first page in an article.

3.4 USING rn

Some folks prefer this older newsreader.

If you type

rn news.announce.newusers

at your host system’s command line, you’ll see something like this:

21 unread articles in news.announce.newusers—read now? [ynq]

If you hit your Y key, the first article will appear on your screen. If

you want to see what articles are available first, though, hit your

computer’s = key and you’ll get something like this:

152 Introduction to news.announce

153 A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community

154 What is Usenet?

155 Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

156 Hints on writing style for Usenet

158 Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part I

159 Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part II

160 Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette

161 USENET Software: History and Sources

162 A Guide to Social Newsgroups and Mailing Lists

163 How to Get Information about Networks

164 How to Create a New Newsgroup

169 List of Active Newsgroups

170 List of Moderators

171 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part I

172 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part II

173 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part III

174 How to become a USENET site

175 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part I

176 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part II

177 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part III

End of article 158 (of 178)—what next? [npq]

Notice how the messages are in numerical order this time, and don’t

tell you who sent them. Article 154 looks interesting. To read it,

type in 154 and hit enter. You’ll see something like this:

Article 154 (20 more) in news.announce.newusers (moderated):

From: spaf@cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford)

Newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.admin,news.answers

Subject: What is Usenet?

Date: 20 Sep 92 04:17:26 GMT

Followup-To: news.newusers.questions

Organization: Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.

Lines: 353

Supersedes:

Archive-name: what-is-usenet/part1

Original from: chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg)

Last-change: 19 July 1992 by spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)

The first thing to understand about Usenet is that it is widely

misunderstood. Every day on Usenet, the “blind men and the elephant”

phenomenon is evident, in spades. In my opinion, more flame wars

arise because of a lack of understanding of the nature of Usenet than

from any other source. And consider that such flame wars arise, of

necessity, among people who are on Usenet. Imagine, then, how poorly

understood Usenet must be by those outside!

—MORE—(7%)

This time, the header looks much more like the gobbledygook you get

in e-mail messages. To keep reading, hit your space bar. If you hit

your n key (lower case), you’ll go to the next message in the

numerical order.

To escape rn, just keep hitting your q key (in lower case), until

you get back to the command line. Now let’s set up your reading list.

Because rn uses the same .newsrc file as nn, you can use one of the

search-and-replace methods described above. Or you can do this: Type

rn

and hit enter. When the first newsgroup comes up on your screen, hit

your u key (in lower case). Hit it again, and again, and again. Or

just keep it pressed down (if your computer starts beeping, let up for a

couple of seconds). Eventually, you’ll be told you’re at the end of the

newsgroups, and asked what you want to do next.

Here’s where you begin entering newsgroups. Type

g newsgroup

(for example, g comp.sys.mac.announce) and hit enter. You’ll be asked

if you want to “subscribe.” Hit your y key. Then type

g next newsgroup

(for example, g comp.announce.newusers) and hit enter. Repeat until

done. This process will also set up your reading list for nn, if you

prefer that newsreader. But how do you know which newsgroups to

subscribe? Typing a lowercase l and then hitting enter will show you a

list of all available newsgroups. Again, since there could be more than

2,000 newsgroups on your system, this might not be something you want to

do. Fortunately, you can search for groups with particular words in

their names, using the l command. Typing

l mac

followed by enter, will bring up a list of newsgroups with those letters

in them (and as in nn, you will also see groups dealing with emacs and

the like, in addition to groups related to Macintosh computers).

Because of the vast amount of messages transmitted over Usenet,

most systems carry messages for only a few days or weeks. So if there’s

a message you want to keep, you should either turn on your computer’s

screen capture or save it to a file which you can later download). To

save a message as a file in rn, type

s filename

where filename is what you want to call the file. Hit enter. You’ll be

asked if you want to save it in “mailbox format.” In most cases, you

can answer with an n (which will strip off the header). The message

will now be saved to a file in your News directory (which you can access

by typing cd News and then hitting enter).

Also, some newsgroups fill up particularly quickly — go away for a

couple of days and you’ll come back to find hundreds of articles! One

way to deal with that is to mark them as “read” so that they no longer

appear on your screen. In nn, hit a capital J; in rn, a small c.

3.5 rn COMMANDS

Different commands are available to you in rn depending on whether you

are already in a newsgroup or reading a specific article. At any point,

typing a lowercase h will bring up a list of available commands and some

terse instructions for using them. Here are some of them:

After you’ve just called up rn, or within a newsgroup:

c Marks every article in a newsgroup as read (or “caught up”)

so that you don’t have to see them again. The system will ask

you if you are sure. Can be done either when asked if you

want to read a particular newsgroup or once in the newsgroup.

g Goes to a newsgroup, in this form:

g news.group

Use this both for going to groups to which you’re already

subscribed and subscribing to new groups.

h Provides a list of available commands with terse

instructions.

l Gives a list of all available newsgroups.

p Goes to the first previous subscribed newsgroup with un-read

articles.

q Quits, or exits, rn if you have not yet gone into a newsgroup.

If you are in a newsgroup, it quits that one and brings you to

the next subscribed newsgroup.

Only within a newsgroup:

= Gives a list of all available articles in the newsgroup.

m Marks a specific article or series of articles as “un-read”

again so that you can come back to them later. Typing

1700m

and hitting enter would mark just that article as un-read.

Typing

1700-1800m

and hitting enter would mark all of those articles as un-

read.

space Brings up the next page of article listings. If already on