NCSA Mosaic for MS Windows User Guide: Advanced Features

News

News Interface

The Mosaic news interface lets you to interact with a newsgroup as if you were using a dedicated news reader, and it maintains a record of the messages you have read. It also displays messages and follow-up messages (threads) in hierarchical format. Mosaic lets you subscribe to newsgroups, post messages to newsgroups, follow-up posted messages, and reply to the author of a news message.

By default Mosaic uses the news server defined in the Preferences... window's Services box (from the Options menu) as the source of newsgroups and messages. In the Services dialog box, the news server is specified in the NNTP Server: field. (See "Services" on page 4-16.) You access news groups in one of three ways:

  1. Configure Mosaic to remember specific news groups (see "Tables" on page 4-18). When you click on the news icon in the toolbar or select Newsgroups from the File menu, your chosen newsgroups are displayed in the document view window as hyperlinks with the number of unread articles displayed.

  2. Access newsgroup directly by entering a URL in the command line using the syntax news:name.of.newsgroup. For example:
 news:comp.infosystems.www.users
  1. If you have access to another news server and you want to read a particular newsgroup that is available only from that server, use the following URL syntax to access the server:
 nntp://name.of.server/name.of.newsgroup 
See "Right Mouse Button Features" on page 5-22 for information on using the right mouse button while reading news.

News Toolbar

The Mosaic News toolbar contains quick links to a variety of functions. A tool's function is only available when the icon is colored. In the sample toolbar below, the catch-up icon (fifth from the right) is greyed out, meaning it is not available.

The tool bar also contains tool tips that describes a button's functionality. The tool tip feature works automatically: place your cursor over the tool button and after a second a small window pops up with a description of the button.

The toolbar can be moved. Point to an open area within the toolbar and left click. By holding the left mouse button down, you can move the toolbar to any edge of your screen or it can stand alone outside of the Mosaic window. By default the toolbar appears at the top left corner of the document view window.

The functions available on the toolbar are:

previous article
next article
previous topic
next topic
post a new article to the current newsgroup
publicly reply to a newsgroup article (follow-up)
privately reply to the author of a newsgroup article
display the current newsgroup's article list
find
find next article
mark all articles as being read in the current newsgroup (catch-up)
next newsgroup
previous newsgroup
read newsgroups, which returns you to your newsgroup list
open a news subscription window to add or delete newsgroups