[Pan-users] Re: Pan question about Group Article Count

[Duncan]

Keith Lee posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on Sat,
01 Oct 2005 08:21:54 -0700:


> In using Free Agent on Windows, it is possible to tell the news server
> that all the articles in a group have been read; therefore, the server
> automatically updates that group's article count.  When I attempe to read
> the latest articles, there are none because of the aforementioned actions.

That's an incorrect description of what happens.  The news /server/
doesn't know or care what you've read (some may log what you download, if
they are particularly snoopy and ignore the privacy implications, but most
only log uploads, which they need to do to track/prevent abuse and for
legal reasons).

Rather, the /client/ (agent, in this case) tracks what you've read,
locally, generally using the group xref numbers (server and group
dependent method, since this number is assigned per server and only unique
within a group, and that only until the server resets its counts, as they
may do if reconfigured/replaced) or message-ids (often server and group
independent, since these IDs are globally universal).

What you are doing is telling the client that when you leave a group, it
should mark all existing overviews as having been already read.

> In using Pan, I try to manually update a group's article then attempt to
> download the latest articles for that group. This time, there are still
> (sometimes alot) of articles left to download.  Is there a way to send
> the news server a message stating "please mark all articles as read"?

Again, it's not the server tracking it, but your news client, but yes, PAN
does have such a configuration option.  Preferences panel, behavior tab,
mark group's articles read when leaving a group.  While you are there, you
might as well look at the rest of the preferences and see if they are set
the way you prefer.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html