Xnews on Windows 11

[D]

Unmoderated Usenet newsgroups have been subjected to spam floods and the
usual sock-puppet/troll-farm infestation since their respective charters
first appeared. Popular groups in the alt.* hierarchy, alt.comp.freeware
for example, have consistently attracted attention from rogue operatives.
They call these unmoderated discussion forums "ancient"...and yet, these
groups are still active. Lurkers are out there too, reading and watching.

The best freeware newsreader client with comprehensive scoring/filtering
features remains Xnews which works flawlessly with Windows 11, and older.
Xnews is full-featured, portable, compact(696 KB zip), and user-friendly.
Xnews links are posted on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xnews ;
All three versions(2002, 2006, and 2009) tested fine on Windows 11 and 7:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141227184804/http://xnews.newsguy.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20141129033514/http://xnews.newsguy.com/test/TEST.ZIP
https://web.archive.org/web/20141129033514/http://xnews.newsguy.com/test/TEST-64.ZIP

Using the final "Xnews/2009.05.01" upgrade version, several popular news
server profiles were added, including "news.eternal-september.org" (also
"localhost" to connect with Omnimix 2.6.8 running tor, torplus, hamster).
This simple "score.ini" entry shows XOVER working fine using only Xnews:

> Score:: -9999
> message-id: googlegroups\.com
> references: googlegroups\.com

As the help manual(file:///xnews/manual.html) explains: "Hard kill means
articles with score <= -9999 will not be shown at all". If no additional
killfile entries are added, this simple solution cleans up at least half
of the newsgroup clutter. Other freeware newsreader clients with scoring
capabilities, thunderbird, pan, and free open-source nzb/binary programs,
are probably worth looking into. Xnews is dated, but so are the pyramids.

[JJ]

Xnews is by far the application which can fully utilize all of NNTP
functionalities. e.g. retrieving a range of older messeges (or any range of
messages) even though a newsgroup is already catched up to most recent
messages - _without_ clearing/resetting the newgroup first.

But IIRC, the reason I don't use it is because it doesn't support multiple
character sets. It can only use ANSI character set of curent system's
language. So, it can't display messages properly if they were made in a
system which uses other language (e.g. German vs English), or were made
using other character set (e.g. Japanese Shift-JIS, or Unicode/UTF-#).

[D]

On Sun, 5 Mar 2023 22:52:03 +0700, JJ <jj4p...@outlook.com> wrote:
>
snip

>> All three versions(2002, 2006, and 2009) tested fine on Windows 11 and 7:
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20141227184804/http://xnews.newsguy.com/
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20141129033514/http://xnews.newsguy.com/test/TEST.ZIP
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20141129033514/http://xnews.newsguy.com/test/TEST-64.ZIP
>

>Xnews is by far the application which can fully utilize all of NNTP
>functionalities. e.g. retrieving a range of older messeges (or any range of
>messages) even though a newsgroup is already catched up to most recent
>messages - _without_ clearing/resetting the newgroup first.
>But IIRC, the reason I don't use it is because it doesn't support multiple
>character sets. It can only use ANSI character set of curent system's
>language. So, it can't display messages properly if they were made in a
>system which uses other language (e.g. German vs English), or were made
>using other character set (e.g. Japanese Shift-JIS, or Unicode/UTF-#).

This small mime proxy (220 KB zip) is linked on the Wikipedia Xnews page and
runs on Windows. Haven't tested it with Xnews, but it might solve that issue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150923091912/http://www.lamaiziere.net/mp_pagen.html

This newer newsreader called 'Pan' (pan-0.146-306.msi, 64-bit 0.146, 21.5 MB)
is rather limited, but provides some slrn scoring features and works fine on
Windows 11 and 7:
https://usenetreviewz.com/pan-newsreader-review/
http://pan.rebelbase.com/
http://pan.rebelbase.com/manual/html/
http://pan.rebelbase.com/manual/html/pan-scoring.html
http://pan.rebelbase.com/download/
https://sites.google.com/site/paninstall/