jmcs@tilde.club wrote:

I've been a 'netnews' user for a couple of days (when I first had
regular access to the internet, these things were already done in
phpBB forums :) ), and I would like to ask a couple questions, and I
guess the test group might be the place where it annoys people the
least.

I think local.test is not the same on all servers, tilde.meta should
be. So I add it and leave a lot of context. If confirmed, setting the follow-up header to only tilde.meta may make sense.

It used to be kind of bad practice to "resurrect" old threads on those webforums (people would do it anyway, but they'd say sorry while doing it...). What's the etiquette in newsgroups? I've been reading the
whole archives, basically, and wondering if it would be 'bad practice'
to say something on those I find interesting... or is it better to
start a new thread?

In news I never was yelled at for replying to an older thread. In most
cases I don't even look at most of the headers. The date sure is among
the ones I look only in very rare cases.

I'm also wondering how much of the experience I'm missing by reading
this all via alpine. Anyone has used alpine and then other clients?

I've no experience with alpine. Really ZERO.

is it significantly better to use any other client? (and, as i said, I
have no idea what I could be missing, but there seem to be "user
profile images", "user agent strings", among the things I've seen
mentioned and I don't see in alpine. Something else?

I use the massive single user dungeon named Gnus.

Also, I think it's mandatory to include the word "test" somewhere, or
I'll be permabanned from all news servers in the world. So I did in
last sentence.

Nah! Only test posting in non *.test groups is a problem.
--
GNUS. The final frontier. They say GNUS has more than 800 commands and functions. Just call them SPELLs! So who needs other MUDs? Be a hero! Survive world wide Emacs. Survive GNUS! (20231209T2338/yeti)
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yeti <yeti@tilde.institute> writes:

jmcs@tilde.club wrote:

[...]

is it significantly better to use any other client? (and, as i said, I
have no idea what I could be missing, but there seem to be "user
profile images", "user agent strings", among the things I've seen
mentioned and I don't see in alpine. Something else?

I use the massive single user dungeon named Gnus.

Here, am on the Gnus side. GNU Emacs is the best investment in
knowledge that I have done, to date.
--
The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that
refuse military service. ~ Albert Einstein
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On Sun, 30 Mar 2025, yeti wrote:

In news I never was yelled at for replying to an older thread. In most
cases I don't even look at most of the headers. The date sure is among
the ones I look only in very rare cases.

I went ahead and replied to an old thread (like from 4 years ago). I
think the problem might be... that maybe not a lot of people will see
it. I was expecting my client to "bring the whole thread to the end of
the list", at least in clients where newest show at the bottom. But my
reply got inserted back there.

Maybe people that have all already marked as read/deleted will only see
my reply at the end as the only new stuff. We'll see.

Anyway, thanks for your replies, guys!
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jmcs@tilde.club wrote:

Maybe people that have all already marked as read/deleted will only see
my reply at the end as the only new stuff. We'll see.

On entering a group I typically see only new posts and "ticked" ones,
which I kind of hold in a state like "unread" to reply later.

So I first saw those and your new post. After hitting [A T] on this
one, I got the thread rebuilt.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
O 20250330T010826 [jmcs@tilde.club][ 0] > Newbie questions
O 20250330T011600 [yeti ][ 0] \->
O 20250330T123647 [keyboardan ][ 0] +->
R. 20250330T195520 [jmcs@tilde.club][ 0] \-> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've no idea how other newsreaders do similar stuff. If they cannot do
this, think about changing the product.
--
1. Hitchhiker 6: (24) "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore
goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next
zebra crossing.
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On Sun, 30 Mar 2025, yeti wrote:

I'm also wondering how much of the experience I'm missing by reading
this all via alpine. Anyone has used alpine and then other clients?
is it significantly better to use any other client? (and, as i said, I
have no idea what I could be missing, but there seem to be "user
profile images", "user agent strings", among the things I've seen
mentioned and I don't see in alpine. Something else?

In case someone is reading this: alpine really improves quite a bit if
you enable colors. Readability is much better, especially when quote
blocks get a different color, etc.

But, the default color schemes (or at least the default in
tilde.club...) are really painful in the eyes. So I went looking for
some examples.

At like the second try, I found this .pinerc and copied lines 502-567

https://github.com/scateu/alpine-patches/blob/master/examples/126.pinerc#L502C1-L567C32

Seriously, the difference in the quoted text alone has been a blessing
to my old tired eyes :D

So, sharing in case someone is out there rawdogging alpine like I was :D

Also, lynx color scheme when visiting news: chef's kiss as well :)

Cheers!
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In local.test jmcs@tilde.club wrote:

I went ahead and replied to an old thread (like from 4 years ago). I
think the problem might be... that maybe not a lot of people will see
it. I was expecting my client to "bring the whole thread to the end of
the list", at least in clients where newest show at the bottom. But my
reply got inserted back there.

I hope this can be chaged. I for one prefer the threads sorted in the
inverse order of last post.
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2