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.