Pan Newsreader

Brian Pack darkaudit at gmail.com
Mon May 30 17:48:53 UTC 2005


On Monday 30 May 2005 09:06 am, hanzj wrote:
> Thank you for your reply, Brian. Yes, I've had no problems with green
> icon files. So are green icon files actually more than just one
> message, or are they only a one-message file?

The green-iconed messages are either single-message files, or multiple-message 
files that have all the messages. Either way, the final file is complete.

> But with red files, i don't know what to do. With red files, does that
> mean that there's nothing that the user can do? Red files are multiple
> files.

That depends on the poster. Sometimes a poster will number a series of files 
he's posting, but Pan will read it as a series of messages instead. So you'll 
have a set of complete files, but the icon will be red. For those, just 
highlight and click decode.

OTOH, if it *is* an incomplete file made up of multiple messages, your best 
bet is to wait until all messages have promulgated to your news server. Don't 
try to decode these yet unless there are .PAR files to go with them. PAR 
files help verify and repair usenet posts. Apt-get par2 for this package.

> To answer your question, yes, I'm _also_ talking about a multi-part
> posting. So what is the best way to download them with Pan? Just select
> them all then "Save Attachment As..."?

If it's a multi-file (as apposed to multi-message, single-file) post, 
highlight the group and hit decode. The files will save to whatever folder 
you have assigned in the newsgroup properties. Right click on the group and 
select properties to change. To reassign to a new folder, you'll need to use 
the trailing /.

> Are most files in Usenet nowadays .rar files?

RAR has become a standard, but mostly for very large files that cannot be made 
into a multi-message, single-file post. A good example is the DVD groups. A 
single DVD will be compressed into ~70-80 .rar files of about 50MB each, 
which will each be posted as a multi-message file. When all the messages for 
a file are in, the icon will be green, and it will look like a single line 
item. If there are messages missing, the icon will be red, and there is 
usually a + next to the subject indicating that this is a thread. When more 
messages arrive, the icon will turn green, and it will look like the first 
example.

When extracting these, you only need to open the first .rar file. As long as 
all the others are present, it will fully extract the entire archive 
automagically.

-- 
http://www.livejournal.com/users/darkaudit/
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