Newsgroups: About newsgroups at HREF Tools Corp.

Thursday Sep. 10, 2020 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
    NNTP Setup Tutorial
  • XanaNews
    Written in Delphi, full Delphi source available, quite friendly to use ( Download XanaNews from github )
• the address of our newsgroup server: news.href.com
• we run on the default NNTP port, 119
• a username and password: request from customer service because the news.href.com server requires you to log on

Newsgroup Names

Probably your NNTP client will show you the available newsgroups. Consider subscribing to:

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

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.

Thanks to Peter Hyde at WebCentre in New Zealand 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.

NNTP Server - Credits

Many thanks to Steffen Wendzel, the author of the open-source NNTP server behind news.href.com. We ran the win32 version for many years, and moved to CentOS7 in March 2015. If you are interested in running your own NNTP server, look for WendzelNNTPd-OSE on Source Forge.