Version History
	Contents: Version 1.5 Version 1.4 Version 1.3 Version 1.2 Version 1.1a Version 1.0

Version 1.4

NewsRog 1.4 Update To use this update, you must have already installed NewsRog 1.0 through 1.3. Click on the supplied Update_1.4 icon in order to begin the install process. Changes for NewsRog 1.4b Bug Fix A kill filter bug introduced in version 1.4 is fixed. Bug Fix The uudecode filter now handles 4-octal-digit file modes as well as 3. Bug Fix The line count displayed by the MIME plugin was always zero. It is now displayed properly. New Feature There is a new option in the uudecode and MIME plugins to display the width, height, and depth of images in the information block. This is turned on by default. New Feature There is a new group option which allows incremental loading of articles to be turned off. This is handy in binaries newsgroups to prevent needless re-parsing of uuencoded data. Change If an article is canceled part way through a download, leaving only a partial article in the local memory cache, then the entire article is re-read from the network next time the article is fetched, rather than the incomplete article being read from the memory cache. Bug Fix If a network error occurred during a batch download operation, NewsRog would crash after the error requestor was canceled. This has been fixed. New Feature There is a "Reset Article Pos" menu in groups which resets the last article position. Normally, when entering a group, NewsRog reads only the new headers since the last time the group headers were fetched. Using this menu option will reset the last article position, causing all the headers to be re-read the next time a header fetch happens. Typically this is not needed. Changes for NewsRog 1.4a Bug Fix A posting bug introduced in version 1.4 which caused articles to not be sent to the network has been fixed. Changes for NewsRog 1.4 Bug Fix After kill articles in a group reader window, the article list is now updated to remove the killed articles. Bug Fix Pressing the "Mark as Read" or "Mark as Unread" buttons from the group list window will now cause the article list to be updated if the group window for the selected group is open. Bug Fix Batch downloads from the group list window were ignoring global kill filters. This has been fixed. Bug Fix The prefix 'Re: ' is now removed before comparing subject strings in the header match filter. It was previously not, meaning that kill entries by subject created using the "Skull" icon in the group reader window were not processed correctly. Bug Fix The local timezone adjustment could produce article datestamps in excess of 24:00 hours. This has been fixed. Change The memory allocation scheme for news articles has been changed to allow for increased performance when expiring or deleting articles (or article headers) from memory. In some cases, this now happens up to 10 times as fast. New Feature The Post Editor now has an "Insert Quoted" menu item which will add a text file as quoted text. New Feature In addition to icons for open, closed, and broken groups, there is a new group icon in the group list window which is displayed after a batch download operation on a given group. The icon is reset when a group is read. This way, it is easy to see which groups have batch downloaded articles since the last time the group was read. New Feature The server group's list has an option to view the groups newly created since the last time this option was used. Bug Fix A memory corruption problem when sending posts to the network has been fixed. Bug Fix If the font of some text in a scrollable quote block was set to italic, bold, or underlined, the height of the block would be miscalculated in previous versions. Change The method of fetching headers has been changed to work better with some idiosyncratic news servers. New Feature Many news servers do not automatically supply a Bytes: header, in which case NewsRog cannot display the size of the article in Kb. There is a new option in the Config area which instructs NewsRog to ask for this header explicitly. On the other hand, some news servers have performance problems when doing this and header downloads will become slower. In this case, NewsRog can be instructed not to ask for the Bytes: header. Change If an article is aborted in the middle of a transfer, it is now marked with the "Broken" icon. Bug Fix Kill filters that were run against new articles read from the network were being processed correctly, but kill filters run against articles read from the local disk cache could cause enforcer hits in some situations. Bug Fix When batch downloading articles, the article fetched immediately after a "broken" article (one which was not available on the server) would have an extra line inserted into the article body with a raw NNTP return code from the server. This has been fixed. Bug Fix The count of subscribed groups in the group list window ("Subscribed Groups (nn)") was remaining at zero when the group list window was first opened. It now displays the count of subscribed groups. Change The throughput when reading from a very fast networked source has been improved. New Feature A new DblSpace filter matches articles who's subject lines have d o u b l e  s p a c e d letters. Such articles are most often spam. Change The default set of characters for the RepeatChar filter now includes a dollar sign ($). Bug Fix The NOSAVE and FORCE options to the CLOSEGROUP ARexx command were not functioning properly in previous versions and have been fixed. Bug Fix The "Bad Wrap" detector in the rewrap display filter would sometimes trigger on an empty middle line. This no longer happens. Bug Fix If the last line of a post composed in the post editor did not end with a newline, it would be skipped when the post was sent to the network. Bug Fix The NoFlow pattern in the Rewrap display filter was being used as an anchored pattern, which means that it had to match the entire line. This has been changed so that it need only match a prefix of the line. New Feature The post line wrapping feature may be disabled via a configuration option in the main config window. If so disabled, line breaks must be inserted via some other means, such as the built in editor or by using an external editor. New Feature NewsRog now issues a warning if a post is sent with lines over 80 characters. Many people still read usenet using Unix text-based newsreaders such as "tin" which perform no line wrapping, and it is considered bad netiquette to post with longer lines. New Feature NewsRog now issues a warning if a post is sent with more quoted text than original text, for posts over a few lines. It is considered bad netiquette to leave unnecessarily large blocks of quoted text in a reply. The post may still be sent, but there is no way to avoid the warning. New Feature The signature separator line added between a post and the signature file may now be omitted if it is part of the signature file itself. A new option in the main configuration window controls this behavior. Change When moving from "One Thread" mode to "All Threads" mode, when all articles in the thread have been read and only read articles are being displayed, the list cursor now better tracks the position of the next thread. New Feature The kill button (skull and crossbones icon) in the group window can now create global kill entries as well as group-local entries. Change When a batch download is in progress and other group windows are open, the article list no longer refreshes during the batch download unless some of the downloaded articles are crossposted to the open group. New Feature Non-ASCII From: and Subject: header lines are now posted in RFC2047 format. New Feature RFC2047 format header lines are decoded into non-ASCII data when they are read from the network. New Feature The badwrap detector in the Rewrap filter now detects a few additional cases, such bad line wrapping after a paragraph who's first line is indented. Bug Fix A bug in the HLQuotes filter could cause quoted regions with most of the lines exceeding the max quote level to be displayed in their entirety instead of being trimmed. Bug Fix The max quote level in the HLQuotes filters was being ignored inside of scrolled quote blocks. Lines who's quoted depth now exceeds this value are trimmed from scrolled quote blocks. New Feature An ASCII smiley (":-)") will no longer be seen as a quote introduction even if the colon character is configured as a quote separator. Change NewsRog now uses TextEditor class version 15.5. Back to Top

Version 1.3

NewsRog 1.3 Update To use this update, you must have already installed NewsRog 1.0, 1.1, or 1.2[A]. Click on the supplied Update_1.3 icon in order to begin the install process. Changes for NewsRog 1.3 Bug Fix A potential stack corruption problem in one of the NewsRog libraries that could cause crashes in some situations has been fixed. Bug Fix A memory corruption problem when closing group windows has been fixed. New Feature NNTP authentication is now supported via the "AUTHINFO user" and "AUTHINFO pass" commands. Kerberos or other types of authentication are not currently supported. User and password information for authentication is defined per server in the server list window. Change The maximum string length for headers has been expanded. Change The height of scrollable text blocks is now calculated more accurately when there are different fonts used within the block. New Feature Double clicking on groups in the Server Groups window will now subscribe to the clicked-on group. New Feature The group pattern string gadget in the Server Group's window is now active by default when the window is opened. New Feature A FAQ management system has been added which can automatically fetch newsgroup FAQs from a FAQ server and display them. FAQs have a predefined multimedia type of "application/X-FAQ". Multimedia actions on FAQs may use the variable "FAQFile", which is set to the filename of the selected FAQ. If no multimedia actions are defined for FAQs, the default is to view them using "multiview". To define two additional actions for FAQs, one to save the FAQ to RAM:, and the other view it using a custom viewer, one might do this: Media Type Action Name Command Args application/X-FAQ SaveRAM copy ${FAQFile} RAM:${GroupAbbrev}-FAQ application/X-FAQ View myviewer ${FAQFile} Please read the tutorial section about the FAQ manager for more information! Bug Fix The MIME display filter could crash if Display Inline was turned off and a non-zero value was on the stack. This has been fixed. Change The busy pointer is no longer displayed during article display, unless the article contains an inlined image. This means that keystrokes pressed during article decoding are no longer lost. This means that it is now more pleasant to start an article downloading into the article viewer, and then page around in the article list while it is transferring. Keystrokes are not lost when the article viewer updates progressively during the transfer. Bug Fix Fixed a possible buffer overflow error in articles with very long subject strings. New Feature A new highlight filter feature can be used to highlight articles in the article list which match a particular selection filter. This might be used, for example, to highlight articles by interesting authors. Bug Fix When articles were killed, they were not being uncached. They now are. New Feature The post editor has a new mode which will show the complete post including the headers and signature file. Bug Fix If a group defined a custom server, and a post was created in that group, the default server was still used to send the post, instead of the group's custom server. The group's server is now used to send the post. This only happens if you create the post from inside of a group. If the post is created directly in the post list window, then the project's default server is used. Bug Fix The Server Group's window would previously not load a saved group file if any group name was longer than 255 characters. This limit has been increased to 1024 to accomodate very long newsgroup names. New Feature The TextStyles display filter now has an option to constrain emphasized regions to start and end at word boundaries. This helps to avoid false positives when, for example, forward slashes are used in pathnames. New Feature The "AutoClip" configuration option can be selected in order to have text that's selected in an article view be copied to the system clipboard as soon as it is selected. If unselected, the clipboard behavior is identical to previous versions of NewsRog. Bug Fix Replying to posts with very long Newsgroups: or Subject: headers would cause a crash 100% of the time. This has been fixed. Bug Fix If two articles in a group had the same message ID, NewsRog would corrupt the free memory pool. This should *never* happen since message ID's are supposed to be unique, but in any case, the bug has been fixed. Change NewsRog no longer uses the NNTP XHDR command to fetch message IDs from the server when downloading the group overview information. It seems that some NNTP servers are very slow in replying to the XHDR command over a large range of articles, so an alternate method is now employed that may be faster on some news servers. There are two drawbacks to the new method: First, when switching to a new NNTP server, NewsRog cannot be as intelligent about skipping article headers that are already present in the local news database. Second, more data must be transferred over the modem when fetching the group's headers (although this may be offset by the higher transfer speeds for servers which don't do XHDR quickly). Bug Fix NewsRog would get confused threading information for some types of NNTP servers. This has been fixed. Change NewsRog now employs an alternate method of keeping the article list in sync with changes to articles that results in improved performance when switching between different article list modes. Change A new method of batch downloading articles is now employed which is better at maintaining a streaming data flow. This can result in vastly improved batch download times. Streaming batch downloads are only supported by using the "Batch D/L Articles..." button in the group list window. New Feature The batch download status windows now display some other information, including the elapsed time (ET) for the transfer so far, the estimated time remaining, and the average number of headers or articles per second transferred so far. New Feature A Batch D/L filter is now available in the Group List window. This filter controls, on a group by group basis, which articles will be batch downloaded. Thus, it is now possible to batch download only new articles, or only those less than a certain size, and so on. Bug Fix Both batch D/L buttons in the Group List window (for headers, and for headers+articles) are now disabled when either is in progress, since these operations cannot take place simultaneously. Bug Fix If a batch D/L function was in progress, and another group window was closed, NewsRog would enter an infinite loop and lock up. This has been fixed. Bug Fix Certain images that could not be decoded by the datatypes library would produce a (harmless) enforcer hit in NewsRog. This has been fixed. Bug Fix The prefetch count in the group preferences was off by one and has been fixed. If set to 2, it would only prefetch one article, and if set to 1, it would not prefetch any. New Feature An ARexx port has been added, with approximately 85 commands. More will be added in future versions. A new chapter in the References section of the manual describes the ARexx commands. Bug Fix The global "Any/All" mode of many of the filter lists was being ignored in many situations. This has been fixed. New Feature The post editor now offers improved rewrapping which is more intelligent about quoted text. There is also a new menu option to explicitly rewrap the editor text instead of having it done when the text is posted to the network.. Change The "Bad Wrap" detection in the Rewrap filter has been improved to detect some additional cases. Bug Fix The EMail filter had a bug which could, in rare circumstances, cause messages to be truncated. This typically happened only when parsing binary data, such as when trying to display uuencoded or MIME data without the associated filters turned on. New Feature The EMail filter now has an option to require dots (.) in email address hostnames. For example, "user@myhost.com" would be matched, but not "user@myhost". This can prevent false positives when parsing certain types of data. Back to Top

Version 1.2

NewsRog 1.2 Update To use this update, you must have already installed NewsRog 1.0 or 1.1. Click on the supplied Update_1.2 icon in order to begin the install process. Changes for NewsRog 1.2 New Feature Newly downloaded articles can now be marked with an icon in the article list. The new icon can be reset when the group is closed, or when articles are read, or both. The feature can also be disabled on a per-group basis from the group preferences. New Feature A new selection filter can be used to match new articles. Bug Fix Previously, tabs in articles were always being expanded to 8 spaces. Now, they are expanded only to the next position which is a multiple of 8 characters. Bug Fix Global kill filters were not being processed properly. They now are. New Feature The relative weight of the size of the article list in the group window can now be set via the "Article List Weight" setting in the main preferences. For example, if you want the ratio of article list to article view heights to be 40:60, you can set this number to "40". This setting is found in the "Program Options/Misc Options" area of the config window. New Feature Both the MIME & UUDecode display filters now have an option to create directories when the "Save" button is pressed if those directories don't already exist. This does not affect the "Save As" button, which still uses the file requestor. New Feature Both the MIME & UUDecode display filters now have an option to disable the "OK" and "Cancel" requesters that are normally displayed after a file is saved. New Feature Groups now have a new variable called GroupNameChr. It can supply the group name with "." characters transformed to an alternate character, which defaults to "/". Use it like this: Varible Group Name Expands To ${GroupNameChr} alt.foo.bar alt/foo/bar ${GroupNameChr,/} alt.foo.bar alt/foo/bar ${GroupNameChr,-} alt.foo.bar alt-foo-bar ${GroupNameChr,#} alt.foo.bar alt#foo#bar This can be used inside the "Save Dir" field of MIME & uudecode filters to automatically save data to pathnames built from the group name. For example, you might use "DH0:Whatever/${GroupNameChr}". Bug Fix the MUI help for the variable list in the config window was missing. New Feature There is a new Headers area in the global config window where optional headers such as X-No-Archive may be defined for a group or a specific set of groups such as "comp.sys.*". A "Custom Headers" checkbox in the post editor controls whether custom headers are posted or ommitted. New Feature A new AgeRange selection filter can select articles based on their age in days. New Feature There is a new available column for article lists that shows the articles age in days, hours, and minutes. The displayed age is the article's age when the group was opened, and is not updated continuously. Bug Fix Fixed a number of typos in the documentation. Bug Fix previously, draging a subset of the filters from one filter list to another would cause them *all* to get copied. Now, only the ones that got dragged are actually copied. New Feature The size of articles in Kb/Mb can now be displayed in the article list. This only works for newly downloaded articles. Articles that were fetched before version 1.2 will display a question mark for this field. New Feature A SizeRange filter is available to select articles by size. You might, for example, filter articles over 50 Kb. New Feature There is a new article list sort option for sorting by article size. Bug Fix The group's defined sort order is now saved with the project and will be restored when the group is re-entered. Bug Fix The group's column settings in the article list are now saved with the project and will be restored when the group is re-entered. Bug Fix Hiding the toolbar window and showing it again no longer causes a duplicate set of icon images to be displayed. Bug Fix Hiding the last open main window now causes NewsRog to iconify itself. Change Running NewsRog a second time no longer creates another application. Bug Fix Articles which have been killed are now also added to the read article count, so that a group's unread article count will be zero when all articles have been either read or killed. Bug Fix Previously, using the "Use Full Headers" option in groups would cause enforcer hits if the cursor was moved off of an article's entry in the artice list *after* NewsRog started fetching the article from the network, but *before* any lines arrived up from the server. This no longer happens. New Feature The main windows now have a "Quit (No Save)" menu option that will quit without saving the group project (even if the exit mode is set to save projects on exit). It is best to use this only when absolutely needed, since the group contains state information that is needed for optimal operation of the program. Bug Fix The explicit expire menu option in the group window wouldn't function correctly if the first article number reported by the NNTP GROUP command was not preset on the server. An alternate method of determining the age of the oldest article in the group is now used which does not have this problem and it should now work on a wider range of servers. Bug Fix Previously, the group status line would display: "D/L'ing Articles (1 of 1)..." and not return to display "Idle" after displaying an article that was fetched from disk or memory cache instead of from the network. This has been fixed. Bug Fix Fixed a problem that was causing rare but occasional crashes either when exiting groups or when shutting down the program. New Feature Windows-Demangler. Some broken MS-Windows applications put Windows backslash-style path components in uuencoded or MIME filenames. A new feature detects these names and will ask you whether to translate them to a simple basename before saving. This will avoid the "Please insert volume E:" requestors and backslashes as part of filenames. Bug Fix The "Set Default" button in the server list window was not working. Bug Fix Fixed a crash that could occur under rare conditions in the post editor if zero sized files were saved and re-edited, and the stack frame contained a particular value. Bug Fix The insert feature of the builtin editor now inserts the text at the cursor location instead of replacing the old buffer text with the new. Bug Fix A single header split among multiple lines no longer cause NewsRog to treat this as the end of the header region. However, to properly cope with articles with a header split onto multiple lines, the "Use Full Headers" option must be turned on. This should fix the problem of the MIME Content-Type: header's "boundary" parameter being on a separate line from the Content-Type: header itself. New Feature There are new buttons and hotkeys for moving forward/backward by threads/articles in the group reader window. All common browing actions (scrolling in an article, moving to the next/previous article or next/previous thread) can now be performed using only the numeric keypad. Change In order to accommodate using the numeric keypad '+' and '-' keys for moving forward and backward by articles, the hotkey for the article list column editor has been changed to '^' Change Image Bitmaps such as used in the main toolbar window and the post editor are now cached in memory. This improves the performance when the window containing them is hidden and then shown again (in the post editor, for example). New Feature There are several new article list search options. The list of headers to search through now includes new entries: All Headers Searches through all article headers. Cached Bodies Searches through the bodies of all articles that are currently displayed in the article list and have cached bodies. Hdrs+Cached Bodies Searches through the headers + bodies of cached articles displayed in the article list. All of the above modes work with dynamic seaches, although a fast machine and disk subsystem is necessary for reasonable performance of dynamic searching though a large number of article bodies fetched from disk. Having a sizeable disk cache helps as well, but on a fast machine, performance is quite reasonable. New Feature When searching in article bodies, if the search text is found inside of a scrollable quotation block, the block will be scrolled down to show the search text. This only works with scrollable quote blocks, not toggled blocks. Bug Fix Typing too fast for dynamic searches to keep up would sometimes cause the search to miss seeing valid matches. This no longer happens. Bug Fix Deleting characters from the middle of the string when doing dynamic searches now works better. Change Deleting all the characters from the string gadget in search windows now causes the next search to restart from the beginning, even if the search start position was initially later. New Feature The article list in the group window can be restricted to viewing just a selected set of articles with the new menu option "Limit to Selected". This, in combination with the search features, provides an easy way to, for example, batch download all articles containing some string in the subject line. Bug Fix The rewrap filter would occasionally remove blank lines that should have been left in to separate paragraphs. It is a bit more intelligent about this now. Although doing perfect rewrap in the absense is markup information is not possible, the filter performs better now. New Feature The HideSig filter has an option for specifying the maximum length of a signature block. This helps to prevent hiding of text when authors use signature style separator lines to separate quoted from new text. New Feature The article font and color can now be specified per group, in the group window's config area. If turned off, the values from the main config window are inherited. Bug Fix Going to offline mode now closes bsdsocket.library. This should prevent TCP stacks from sending quit signals to NewsRog if they exit while NewsRog is still running, as long as NewsRog is in offline mode. In online mode, of course the networking library must be open, so exiting the TCP stack will send a quit signal to NewsRog. Back to Top

Version 1.1a

NewsRog 1.1a Update Changes for NewsRog 1.1a Bug fix Articles with a From: field containing an open paren but no closing paren, such as: Joe Cool ( would cause NewsRog to crash when displaying the article. Fixed. Bug fix The multimedia actions list was not preserving the stack size and priority set for various commands. Bug fix If the NNTP server reset its message IDs, NewsRog would sometimes fail to read new messages. This situation is now detected. Bug fix If, due to a corrupted database on the NNTP server, XHDR returned a null Msg-ID for an otherwise valid article, NewsRog would crash. This has been fixed. However, this situation should never occur and is a data corruption problem on the news server. Bug fix If a global display filter was added with a group pattern, the filter would properly appear or not appear in the global filter list of individual groups. But when an article was displayed, all filters would be used anyway. Patterns in global display filters work properly now. New Feature There is now a button in the group list to toggle between Online and Offline mode. It performs the same function as the menu items. New Feature There is now a built in text editor for composing posts. External editors may still be used as well. New Feature There are some new options in the global config area to control line wrapping for posts. New Feature There is a new option to turn off NewsRog generated message IDs. In this case, the news server must generate the message ID. It is usually best to let NewsRog generate Message IDs, but in some firewall configurations the news server must do it. New Feature The bold, italic, and underline styles in the TextStyle display filter can now be turned on and off independently. In many cases, for example, it might be desirable to turn off the italic style to avoid making slashes/used/to/separate/alternatives or path/names/ into italic text. New Feature When toggling on hidden text (such as a hidden signature block), the region is now scrolled into the visible display area if it was partially out of view. New Feature The numeric pad enter key can now be used as a synonym for the return key. New Feature The NewsRog toolbar style can now be set to horizontal or vertical, with or without labels. New Feature A new HLPatt filter can highlight user defined patterns in article bodies. You might, for example, highlight your cat's name when reading posts in the rec.pets.cats.* hierarchy. New Feature There is now a "Select All" button in the post list window. Change The ramiga-c hotkey no longer closes the group reader window. Instead, it copies any currently selected text to the clipboard, which is a more standard meaning for this key. Change The browse mode in the group reader now will load the article highlighted in the article list instead of the next article, if no article is currently displayed in the article view. Back to Top

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Version 1.0

First public release.