Extras

The GNKSA only sets minimal standards. It is by no means a complete list of all the things Usenet software could do to help and encourage the user to produce good Usenet articles.

For that reason, in GNKSA reviews an `Extras' field is provided: if a particular program has features that really serve decent net-keeping, but are unmentioned by the GNKSA, they can be mentioned here. Think of it as scoring `bonus points', or `extra credits'.

Quite a few programs have been reviewed, and even more have been mentioned. I cannot even here claim to be complete, but I have compiled a list of nice features encountered in various newsreaders. So, you newsreader authors out there: here's your chance to push the envelope, to give your software that cutting edge...

A few nice ideas for news software

• Offer NoCeM support [Gnus, ..]
• Warn the user when selecting a non-monospaced (i.e. proportional) display font [MacSOUP]
• Use available resources to provide the user with relevant information the best possible way:
  • Colouring preferred/killed/scored articles in article lists [Newswatcher family, Knews, MacSOUP]
  • Distinguish articles in a particular font face according to their score [Gnus]
  • Drawing a thread display, providing a clear thread overview [trn, strn, slrn, MacSOUP, Knews, Gravity, Gnus, ...]
  • Allowing navigating directly through the thread display [MacSOUP, Knews, ...]
  • Use colouring in the thread display to make certain articles stand out (the user's own, ...) [MacSOUP, Knews]
• Expand tabs (to the user's width of choice) to prevent tabdamage [MacSOUP]
• Use gnksalib for message validation/modification when posting (refusing to post badly broken messages, fixing non-standard Subject prefixes, repairing damaged References headers, ...)
• Respect the `Mail-Copies-To: ' header [MacSOUP, slrn, Gnus, ...]
• Use the `Posted-and-Mailed: ' header in mail copies of Usenet articles
• Remove stealth whitespace (except of course from the signature separator)
• Remove spurious lines [MacSOUP]
• Warn if `Followup-To: ' content is not a subset of `Newsgroups: ' content when following up [rnr]
• Warn for groups in `Newsgroups: ' and `Followup-To: ' that do not appear to exist [Knews]
• Warn for consequences when posting to a .test newsgroup (especially if `Subject: ' does not hint to "ignore") [rnr]
• Display `one-line description' from the server's `newsgroups' file [Knews, nn, the rn family, tin, ...]
• Show user moderation status (of moderated groups, especially)
• Seamlessly integrate, in a modular, transparent fashion that allows full user choice of preferred handlers, with the users working environment:
  • Let the user open any URL referred to in messages (interpreting Message-IDs as news URLs) [Gnus, any Mac OS application, except really poorly implemented ones]
  • Barring that, let the user at least open articles directly by Message-ID [Knews]
  • Barring full general URL handling, at least offer specific HTTP URL handling, passing them to the user's web browser of choice [Knews]
• Keep track of posted articles to decide whether or not the user is allowed to cancel/supersede an article
• Offer PGP support [tin, Gnus, ...; any Mac OS application]
• Support combining news flows from multiple servers (each one possibly flaky, or for some reason incompletely fed) [AllNews, NewsHopper, ...]
• Extend the killing/selecting/scoring with a notion of `inheritance' - i.e. enable killing (selecting, assigning weights to) subthreads [MacSOUP, Knews, ...]
• Offer powerful mechanisms to enable users to cope with the abundance of newsgroups (so that they are more likely to find, and post to, the right group): selecting groups by `keying' part of their name, creating selections (querying) the full group list, offer a searchable, folding in/out hierarchical full group list browser [Knews, MacSOUP, the NewsWatcher family, NewsGrazer, Alexandra, NewsRover, Gnus, ...]

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Last modification: 2225 Sep 1993 by JS.