Newsgroups: About newsgroups at HREF Tools Corp.

Thursday Oct. 11, 2012 Santa Rosa, California

Newsgroups are in the news here!

We are using newsgroups to provide technical support for these products: WebHub, Rubicon and IIS Backup.

To participate, you will need

• a newsgroup reader such as
  • Thunderbird
    Primarily an email client; supports the use of a proxy
  • XanaNews
    Written in Delphi, full Delphi 2006 source available, zero proxy support as of 08-Aug-2009, otherwise quite friendly to use
• the address of our newsgroup server: news.href.com
• a username and password: get those here, free because this server requires you to log on

Newsgroup Names

Probably your NNTP client will show you the available newsgroups. Here is the current list:

• hreftools.public.announce
• hreftools.public.rubicon.support
• hreftools.public.rubicon.install
• hreftools.public.webhub.support
• hreftools.public.webhub.install
• hreftools.public.iisbackup.install
• hreftools.public.iisbackup.support

General Advice on NNTP Connectivity

Embarcadero provides a very helpful overview here, Article #38435. This article explains, among other things, how to use XanaNews to connect to Delphi newsgroups and other public newsgroups hosted by Embarcadero.

XanaNews - Authenticate Setting

If you are using XanaNews, go into Account Properties > Server Settings and make sure that the checkbox for Always Authenticate is turned ON as shown in the screenshot here.

If you have trouble reading messages, go into Account Properties > Dialup & Connection and turn off XOVER and possibly turn off pipelining. The number of connections is probably not important, you can keep the default value.

Exit and restart XanaNews between major changes to the connection settings because you can get different results, using the same settings, after a restart of XanaNews.

If you have trouble downloading ALL our newsgroup messages with XanaNews, try downloading just headers and then, if you are interested in any particular message, click into it to download that particular message. That will be quicker for you, and is much more likely to work. At least two people have had trouble downloading ALL messages; XanaNews downloads 1 message and then hangs.

Thanks to Peter Hyde for the XOVER, etc. advice.

XanaNews - Message Order

Sometimes it helps to see messages as threaded conversations. Sometimes it helps to see just the newly added ones. To toggle between these, go into Tools > Options > Default Settings > Sorting and Threading.

Alternative NNTP Clients

There are many alternatives to XanaNews, including Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook. Wikipedia lists more than a dozen more.