Introduction

Overview

Additionally, NewsPlex can be used to quickly explore large lists of candidate news-servers and evaluate their service value. This is called the Minimal mode.

NewsPlex runs on your own machine (or possibly on some other machine), in the background, and appears as a standard news-server to your news-reader and as a news-reader to your news-servers. It is therefore somewhat similar to a proxy or to a web cache.

NewsPlex runs on Windows (95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP), OS/2 and Unix (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Windows's Interix subsystem). This version and this manual are for Windows.

Features

Full news-group list

Handling of news-groups is deferred. All news-groups are originally in the inactive state. This allows to reduce disk, cpu and network usage and was a prerequisite for handling the full news-group list. The activation of a given news-group is performed automatically, when a news-reader accesses it, ie. requests the list of articles it contains. Up to a few thousand news-groups can be activated before performances drop.

The first time a news-group is entered, NewsPlex generates an internal article announcing that the news-group is now being downloaded, starts downloading the news-group from all news-servers, waits for a few seconds to have a chance of getting some real articles, and returns the resulting list to the news-reader. The full news-group contents will be available a few moments later.

Configuration

NewsPlex is plug-and-play. When run for the first time, it will auto-configure itself to handle the full list of news-groups and to use all the news-servers which it can find on your local network or referenced in files on your machine. It will complete this list with a few dozens of well-known specialized news-servers.

It is later possible to add or remove news-servers. It is also possible to restrict the group list, for example to save memory. It is also possible to improve performance by either tuning some parameters or activating features like the asynchronous article retrieval.

NewsPlex is controlled through command-line options and configuration files at startup time, or dynamically, from a Web browser or by telnetting into it. The provided NpNNTP command line utility can be used to issue commands to NewsPlex, for example from batch files.

Clients

NewsPlex can service several news-readers at the same time. This notably allows to control it from the network while it is already being used by some news-reader.

NewsPlex constantly monitors whether the news-reader which has requested an article is still there to receive it and has not disconnected in the meantime. If not, it stops the retrieval tentatives immediately.

NewsPlex can be seamlessly inserted between your existing news-server and your news-reader, without disturbing the list of news-groups or the article numbers. Note: this feature is currently broken.

Access

NewsPlex allows optional login/password authentication of users. It offers two levels of access: ordinary/user and privileged/administrator.

It is possible to restrict access to only news-readers running on the same computer.

Background operation

NewsPlex can be run in the background, permanently. It will explore news-servers periodically to maintain its article database up to date.

NewsPlex does not need to be stopped if the network connection goes down, for example because you disconnect from your ISP. It will wait until the connection is up again and continue operations.

On Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, NewsPlex can be installed as a service. This allows to have it running even when nobody is logged in, and to have it launched automatically at system startup.

Performance

NewsPlex always uses the best news-server for requesting an article, among those having it. It will use the remaining news-servers if the best one could not deliver the article. Servers are rated dynamically according to current speed, best speed obtained in the past, latency and availability.

NewsPlex remembers errors occurring in the middle of an article retrieval, typically news-server timeouts or unexpected connection terminations, and will try to use a different news-server as source the next time the article is requested.

Error isolation

NewsPlex is able to use any news-server as news source, even news-servers which implement very old versions of the news transfer protocol, and yet always exports a modern interface to news-readers. Errors occurring during the exploration of news-servers are also recovered, through either restarts, deferring or workarounds. article descriptions imported from news-servers are carefully checked for correctness. Those which appear garbled, typically a result of overruns in the news-server, will be asked for again, as long as progress is made. In non-recoverable situations, bad article descriptions are ignored and not stored in the article database; a correct version will most probably be available from some other news-server. NewsPlex is able by itself to fix incorrect or missing Bytes, Lines and Message-ID information for articles (in the last case, a Message-ID of the time-stamp@newsplex or similar form is generated). Such errors do not cause rejection of article descriptions.

Tricky situations

NewsPlex supports connecting to news-servers either directly, or through proxy servers (SOCKS 5, SOCKS 4, HTTPS, simple tunnels or Sun-specific).

NewsPlex can be used as a client of another NewsPlex. It can even be a client of itself, although this normally happens only accidentally, if a given news-server name resolves to a local IP address.

Filtering

NewsPlex can filter out unwanted articles, based on the From:, Message-ID, Subject: and other fields of article descriptions. Wild-cards are supported.

NewsPlex automatically removes junk lines from the headers of posted articles and does not add lines of its own. Through extra header lines, news-readers tend to disclose more information about your software and hardware configuration than what you usually want other people to know, and this cannot generally be disabled by other means. Currently, the Sender, User-Agent, X-Accept-Language, X-Binary-Poster, X-Converter, X-Hamster, X-Korrnews, X-Mailer, X-MimeOLE, X-MSMail-Priority, X-Newsposter, X-Newsreader, X-Posting-Agent, X-Priority, and X-WM-Posted-At lines are eliminated. This can be adjusted thru clients.junkPostedHeader= settings. Note that some news-readers also embed identification into the standard Message-ID header line. Typically, this can be a prefix like <Xns or a suffix like @4ax.com>. NewsPlex does not modify this Message-ID line by default, but you can use the clients.junkPostedHeader= setting to strip it as well. It is also sometimes possible to ask the news-reader to not provide it. When a posted article does not contain a Message-ID, the news-server will generally generate one by itself. NewsPlex can of course do nothing about header fields added by the news-servers themselves.

Asynchronous article retrieval

asynchronous article retrieval allows to accelerate retrievals by parallelizing operations and eliminating idle moments.

• It is useful when articles are available from several news-servers and the bandwidth bottleneck is remote, so requesting several articles from several different news-servers in parallel allows to progress faster.
• It is also useful if a news-server responds slowly or limits the speed on a single connection, yet allows several connections.
  In all these circumstances a news-reader requesting articles one by one performs poorly.
• It allows to retrieve large batches of articles from news-servers which become temporarily unavailable; most news-readers would stop at the first error.
• Finally, it allows to use the news-reader to do something else while large/binary articles are being retrieved.

An arbitrary number of article retrievals can be scheduled, and up to 4 retrievals are performed at once (this can be adjusted with the async.simultaneous= setting in etc\newsplex.ini). NewsPlex remembers which articles remain to be retrieved even across shutdowns and restarts and finishes retrievals the next time it is run.

You are not obliged to access the asynchronously retrieved articles through the async news-group, because asynchronously retrieved articles are also visible as async\xxxxxxxx.ok files. If articles contain binary attachments, you can directly run arbitrary decoding tools on the files and even delete them when done.

Since version 3.6, the NpUud uudecoding utility is provided and since version 3.7 it also supports the yEnc format, which notably offers reliable decoding and automatic multipart merging. NpUud can extract the binary attachments from any file and put whatever remains into a separate .hdr file named after the first attachment.

The async.executeCmd= setting in etc\newsplex.ini allows to specify the program which will be run each time a new async\xxxxxxxx.ok file is created.

When to use NewsPlex?

If your news-servers are unreliable, become easily unreachable or give timeouts, NewsPlex will isolate you from these errors, perform the necessary retries in the background and keep you posted with the latest news in the minimal time and without drudgery.

Few news-readers allow using several news-servers at the same time, and very few can take articles from several news-servers for a single news-group transparently, or request an article from different news-servers until successful. NewsPlex allows you to choose your news-reader on other criteria than these abilities.

Because NewsPlex can service many users at the same time, running on a well-known machine on your local network, it can avoid everybody the work to setup and maintain a multi-server configuration themselves and can globally reduce the amount of data transferred with the Internet.

Author

NewsPlex version 4.4 is freeware. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You can use it at your own risk, and report whatever problems you have encountered with it. You are free to copy this software ONLY if you include this document file and all the other accompanying files with it. You may NOT charge anyone for a copy of this software other than a small copying fee. You may NOT include this software with any commercial software without the written consent of the author.

Installation and configuration

Unpack the NewsPlex distribution archive to any directory. You should notably have the executable file newsplex.exe and a help file newsplex.htm in HTML format, which you are currently reading. There should also be a boilerplate file file_id.diz and a descript.ion file with descriptions of all the files in the distribution. There are also several utilities provided, which can assist you with dealing with binary and text files of various types.

Because of the auto-configuration feature, you can start NewsPlex without providing any command-line options or configuration files.

Start

Alternatively, you can install NewsPlex as a service at this point, by running it again with the -si command-line option (NewsPlex acts as its own installer). You also need to provide the -d directory option again if NewsPlex is not installed in the current directory.

The NewsPlex service can be started using either Windows service-oriented commands, or by running the program again with the -sa command-line option (NewsPlex acts as its own controller).

Then you can connect your news-reader to machine name localhost (or Internet address 127.0.0.1) and the standard NNTP port 119. NewsPlex will need to connect to at least one news-server and start getting the news-group list from it before offering news-groups other than the async news-group.

Stop

To shutdown NewsPlex when it runs in the foreground you can send it a Ctrl-C or a Ctrl-Break signal. You can also click the Close button, double-click the system menu button or select Close from the system menu of the NewsPlex window.

When NewsPlex runs as a service, it can be stopped using standard Windows service-oriented commands, or by running the program with the -so command-line option (NewsPlex acts as its own controller).

It is also possible to stop NewsPlex from the Web browser interface or by telnetting into it (telnet localhost 119) and entering the NPSHUT command. This command can also be sent with the NpNNTP utility.

As the last recourse, you can terminate NewsPlex using the End Program button of the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del dialog).

Uninstall

If NewsPlex was installed as a service, first stop it by running the program again, passing the -so command-line option, then uninstall the service by passing the -su command-line option. These commands can be executed from any directory and do not need to be passed the -d directory command-line option.

To uninstall NewsPlex, just delete the directory from which you started it (or the work directory specified with the -d command-line option) and the directory to which you unpacked the distribution files; this is usually the same directory. If you just want to delete the generated files, run the program with the -C command-line option. NewsPlex never writes or modifies anything outside of its startup directory or the -d directory.

The configuration files

etc\newsplex.ini replaces most of the command-line options which existed in pre-4.0 versions of NewsPlex and all the files from the old config directory, except config\servers which logically became etc\servers.ini.

Sections are introduced by [section-name] lines, while entries are lines of the entry-name=value form. Entry names are not case-sensitive, but string values can be sometimes.

Certain sections and entries can be repeated. Repeatable sections will create several objects of the same type, eg. each [server] section in etc\servers.ini describes a single news-server. Repeatable entries will create arrays of objects, eg. comment= settings create multiline comments. If a given section or entry type is not supposed to be repeated, it will just update the value(s) of the previous section or entry of the same name. In this case, when NewsPlex rewrites the .ini file, only one such section or entry is written.

This manual often uses the section-name.entry-name notation in order to refer to entry entry-name in section section-name.

In the descriptions, boolean settings are shown with their non-default (active) values.

If a setting is not present, NewsPlex will use the default hard-coded value.

This release of NewsPlex does not yet offer the possibility of modifying all the settings in the .ini files from the Web interface. You will have to edit the files by hand therefore.

If you modify them, you will need to restart NewsPlex before the modifications are taken into account. The restart can be performed from the Actions web page, with the NPRESTART command or by shutting down NewsPlex and re-running it. Note that certain files are rewritten automatically on exit. This can be disabled however.

The etc\servers.ini file

It can also specify which proxy, if any, should be used for accessing a given news-server (see a specific chapter below).

There are 4 possible types of sections:

[file] section

Setting	Description
comment=string1 comment=string2 ...	Allows to add comments to the file. Can be repeated as many times as necessary, to create multiline comments. Comments will be preserved if this file is rewritten. It is also possible to have comment lines starting with ; or #, but such comments are not preserved if the file is rewritten.

[server] sections

Compared to the old one line per news-server config\servers file:

• the server-number field has become the id= setting and is now allocated automatically
• the server-url has become the url= setting, and is the only compulsory setting
• the flags have become various fully spelled out settings, eg. a became the attemptMsgId= setting
• comments can be stored in comment= settings

There are no equivalents to the old exit and dontexplore keyword lines. The first one would make little sense, as NewsPlex must be able to parse the etc\servers.ini file entirely to be able to rewrite it later without losing information. For the second keyword you can use the cut and paste facilities of a text editor to add an explore=0 setting to every news-server which requires it.

Setting	Old news-server flag	Description
id=server-number		server-number must be unique for each news-server and greater than 0. It identifies the news-server in the article database and must not be changed after a news-server has been explored. It is computed automatically if not provided; the etc\servers.ini file is rewritten afterwards.
url=server-url		Should be the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the news-server, that is its Web address. It must contain at least the hostname of the news-server, and can optionally contain the news:// prefix, the login name, the associated password and the port of the news-server. A given login name, hostname and port combination can be provided only once because it is used to construct a unique name for files in explore and newsrc2 directories. Some examples: [server] url=news://news1.yourisp.com comment=news-server without login [server] url=news://mylogin:mypass@news2.yourisp.com comment=news-server with login [server] url=news3.yourisp.com:4000 comment=news-server on port 4000 If you need to pass funny characters in the login or in the password, use standard % escape sequences: a % character followed by the hexadecimal ASCII number of the offending character. For example: @ can be escaped as %40 : as %3A a blank as %20 So if the login is for example ano:nymous and the password joe@domain.com, the resulting url= setting will be url=ano%3Anymous:joe%40domain.com@newshost.com
disabled=1		The news-server is disabled. It still has a server-number, but is generally not used in any way until it is reenabled. Currently, re-enabling can be only done by editing the etc\servers.ini file by hand. The disabled news-server notion replaces commented out lines in the old config\servers file.
addedDateSecs=value addedDateString=string		NewsPlex automatically generates these settings when noticing a news-server for the first time in the file.
adjustMaxConnections=count	R, r	Adjust the default maximum number of simultaneous connections allowed to a news-server (4) by the specified amount, positive or negative. Increasing can be useful with news-servers which limit the speed but do not limit the number of simultaneous connections. You will also need to increase the maximum number of simultaneous asynchronous article retrievals if you increase this per-news-server setting beyond that value, otherwise it will not be effective. Decreasing can be useful with news-servers for which the default limit is too high, for example because their owners charge you per connection count or per connection time. Decreasing too much will prevent NewsPlex from using the news-server at all.
attemptMsgId=1	a	Attempt retrieval of articles even if the news-server does not have the news-group or the requested articles in that news-group. Every time an article is requested, NewsPlex will attempt to retrieve it from the news-server as well. Some news-servers have articles which are not or which are no more referenced in any of their news-groups. It is still possible to retrieve them by Message-ID. NewsPlex normally attempts this during zombie retries. Passing this option allows to do it for specific news-servers all the time.
blindLogin=1	n	Blind login. Do not wait for the news-server welcome message and issue a command immediately, typically an article download request. This setting is useful with certain news-servers only, which issue the welcome message with a delay, and in the meantime accept other commands.
category=category	tcategory	Set the category of the news-server, ie. its download priority, to value category, which can be negative, 0 or positive. Zero is the default value. This allows to enforce the order in which news-servers are used for downloading articles. NewsPlex will not use a news-server with a higher category until it has tried to get the article from news-servers of lower categories. NewsPlex will only wait for the number of secondes defined by the connect.maxCategoryWait= setting before trying to use a higher category news-server if it cannot obtain a connection to any news-server from the current (or lower) categories. You should set reuseForAsync=0 (Do not reuse the news-server for an asynchronous article retrieval after it becomes free) for news-servers for the categories to be fully effective during async retrievals. See here for more details.
closeOnListOk=1	C	Consider that errors occurring when NewsPlex is listing available news-groups on the news-server indicate the end of list. This allows to use otherwise unusable news-servers.
cost=value	cvalue	Define a cost for news-server. The value will be considered as the number of kilo-bytes per second to subtract from the news-server's score when evaluating it in order to retrieve an article. Note that the cost notion only applies after the category notion, which means it is only used among news-servers of the same category.
daysTooOld=days	ydays	Limit the age of article descriptions added from this news-server to the article database to days days. By default, the age is not limited. This setting takes precedence over the explore.daysTooOld= setting in etc\newsplex.ini. See also the NPDELETEOLD command.
explore=0	U	Enable or disable the automatic exploring of the news-server. If 0 is passed, the news-server will not be explored periodically, it will also not be explored after a news-group has been activated and it will not be explored after an article has been posted to it. The operator can still request a single exploration with NPEXPLORESERVER or thru the Web interface. This setting can be interestingly combined with the attemptMsgId= setting, to create a news-server where NewsPlex tries to take articles from blindly, by Message-ID, without ever asking for anything else.
emulateXoverUsingHead=1	H	Use HEAD requests rather than XOVER requests to obtain the article descriptions from the news-server. NewsPlex normally does this automatically when necessary, but you can force it, for example if XOVERs are slow. See also the emulateXoverUsingXhdr= setting.
emulateXoverUsingXhdr=1	x	Use XHDR requests rather than XOVER requests to obtain the article descriptions from the news-server. You can set this mode of operation if XOVERs are slow. See also the emulateXoverUsingHead= setting.
extraConnectTime=value	X	Give extra time to news-server for responding when connecting. Some overloaded news-servers may need this. Use this setting if the news-server can be normally connected at TCP level, but subsequently does not send a welcome message before NewsPlex stops waiting and considers the connection as failed. Only use this setting on good news-servers, because it increases the time before NewsPlex tries to use another news-server and hence may slow down things actually.
extraTime=1	T	Give the news-server much more time to answer requests. This allows to avoid disconnects with news-server which take a lot of time to answer some requests, and hence for example it is not possible to complete an exploration successfully. Note that if a news-server is given more time, NewsPlex will also wait longer before switching to another news-server which could provide the same article.
filterArticles=1		Apply filters from etc\filters.ini in real time during explorations. Matching articles will immediately be either rejected or marked as hidden.
groupBeforeMsgId=1	B	Issue a GROUP request before an article retrieval by Message-ID if the group where the article is located is known. This is normally unnecessary, but might help with some news-servers.
ignored=entry-name1=entry-value1 ignored=entry-name2=entry-value2 ...		When NewsPlex encounters invalid, possibly obsolete entries, it stores them in this setting.
ignoreGroup=group-name1 ignoreGroup=group-name2 ...	g(group-name1 group-name2 ...)	Do not explore specific news-groups on the news-server. Set this option if accessing a certain news-group causes malfunction of the news-server, like disconnects or indefinite waits, or if the news-group contains too many corrupted article descriptions on the news-server. This setting can be repeated.
ignoreLoginFailure=1	i	Ignore login failure. NewsPlex will attempt to use a news-server even if the login sequence failed.
isSlow=1	S	The news-server is slow, so do not use the LISTGROUP or XHDR LINES requests for getting the article numbers, but rely on the results on the GROUP request instead.
keepAlive=1	A	Keep-alive the news-server for 15 minutes after it was last used. Normally, connections to idle news-servers are closed after 5 minutes, without keep-alive. This setting can be automatically set by NewsPlex if the news-server appears as difficult to connect to, for example because it limits the number of concurrent users and is very popular at the same time. It is also set if a news-server closes the connection immediately after a TCP connect. The NPCONNECTED command and the Web page ignore the keep-alive when displaying the duration of idleness for news-servers.
listgroupDoesNotSetGroup=1	O	LISTGROUP does not set the current news-group. This setting allows to deal with news-servers which do not adjust the current news-group when receiving the LISTGROUP news-group request. This is not so easy to detect automatically, hence this setting.
listgroupGroup=group-name1 listgroupGroup=group-name2 ...	l(group-name1 group-name2 ...)	Use the LISTGROUP request instead of GROUP to select the specified group-name news-group on the news-server. This setting can be repeated to define as many news-groups as necessary. This option sometimes allows to access specific news-groups on news-servers which normally forbid entering them thru the standard GROUP request, although they do have them and are able to provide article lists and articles from them normally. Such news-servers should normally have the attemptMsgId=1 setting set for them. However, just because a news-server is able to provide an article by Message-ID does not mean it has the news-group or that it allows listing it. For example, articles could appear in a common junk newsgroup. Instead of using the GROUP request in order to select a specific news-group on the news-server, NewsPlex will use the LISTGROUP request. This request, in addition to its normal behavior of listing the available article numbers in the news-group, also almost always sets the news-group as the current news-group. NewsPlex will simply ignore the article numbers and use the side effect. Because such inaccessible news-groups are usually not listed in the news-group list, the listgroupGroup= setting also adds the specified news-group names to the list of active interesting news-groups on the news-server. It is therefore not possible to have wild-cards in the news-group names.
listgroupIfGroupFails=1		Attempt to use the LISTGROUP request to change the current news-group if GROUP did not work. This setting is similar to the listgroupGroup= setting, except it is only used in error circumstances and does not make NewsPlex consider that the news-server has specific news-groups. It is not compatible with the listgroupDoesNotSetGroup= setting.
listPreferred=1	L	When constructing the list of interesting news-groups offered by the news-server, request the full list and filter it locally instead of requesting only the names of news-groups matching groups.yes= settings. This is the per-news-server version of the explore.alwaysLIST= setting in etc\newsplex.ini.
main=1	m	This news-server is the main news-server (the notion is explained below). Only one news-server can be main.
msgIdIfNbFails=0	M	Do not try to get articles by Message-ID from this news-server. NewsPlex tries to retrieve an article by Message-ID if the article cannot be retrieved by number from its news-group, typically because it has been deleted from it. However, some news-servers stop responding in such circumstances, presumably because the search for the article in other news-groups takes a lot of time.
numbersCollapseMinDistance=value numbersCollapseMaxRanges=value		These settings individually replace the global [explore] settings of the same name (please refer to them for explanations) if the value is non-zero.
postingGroup=group-name-pattern1 postingGroup=group-name-pattern2 ...		Define the news-server as the posting news-server for the specified news-groups. Wild-cards can be used in names and this setting can be repeated.
privateProxy=proxy-url1 privateProxy=proxy-url2 ...	o(proxy-url1 proxy-url2 ...)	This setting, which can be freely repeated, allows to specify per-news-server proxies, which do not need to (and also even cannot) be explicitly given a proxy id. Use this option if you do not want to manage the global numbering of proxies yourself. More about proxies in the [proxies] section.
retrieveArticles=0		Do not retrieve articles from this news-server even if it does have them. This setting is for example useful when an otherwise good news-server contains a corrupted version of an article and you want NewsPlex to attempt retrieving it from some other news-server instead, the next time the article is requested by a news-reader. You can also use NpNNTP to download the article directly, if you know what news-server contains a good copy.
reuseForAsync=0	D	Do not reuse the news-server for an asynchronous article retrieval after it becomes free. Using this setting for news-servers which do not allow many simultaneous connections should give the news-reader less 500 No server having article is reachable errors if the news-reader tries to retrieve some articles directly when asynchronous article retrievals are enabled. See here for more details.
xhdrMessageIdAllowNumberNotGreater=1 xoverAllowNumberNotGreater=1		These two settings allow to properly explore some broken-by-design news-servers. The server.xhdrMessageIdAllowNumberNotGreater= setting makes NewsPlex stop requiring that the list of article number-Message-ID mappings returned by XHDR MESSAGE-ID has strictly progressing article numbers. The server.xoverAllowNumberNotGreater= setting does the same for the list returned by XOVER.
xoverOnEmpty=0	E	Some news-servers do not like that news-readers request the article descriptions for empty groups, and start providing corrupted article descriptions from this moment. This option avoids this.
truncAfterMsgId=1	I	Allow certain article description truncations to occur after the Message-ID field and still accept the article description. NewsPlex only accepts cuts which do not look like a corruption which could be recovered by asking for the article description again, and cuts in the middle of article threading references, since some news-servers limit article descriptions to an arbitrary length and this cut-off falls there.
useFakes=1	F	If the news-server fails to provide descriptions for articles which he has previously declared as available, consider these articles as permanently unavailable. If in the news-server exploration logs you see that for certain news-servers NewsPlex keeps exploring certain articles ranges without getting any article descriptions, you might set this setting. This however introduces a penalty: if the news-server generates article descriptions out of order and at the same time declares the numbers in advance, you might not get all the article descriptions. Note that when this option was introduced, NewsPlex did not yet implement the collapsing of neighboring article number ranges, so today it is less interesting.
useXrefs=0		Use or do not use the cross-reference information provided by the news-server within the article descriptions (the Xref: tags or lines) to update other news-groups than the one currently being explored with information about cross-posted articles. The explore.useXrefs= setting in etc\newsplex.ini allows to disable this globally.
xgTitleBroken=1	G	Do not use the XGTITLE request for getting the list of groups. This setting is equivalent to the explore.noXGTITLE= setting in etc\newsplex.ini except it only applies to one news-server.
zombies=0		If zombies are disabled for a news-server, when the last news-server reference to vanish for an article is from this news-server, the article will not become a zombie, but will be marked as deleted and later removed from the article database. You can only disable zombies this way on news-servers which are the sole source of their articles. For example, someone can cancel and reissue an article on a company internal news-server, and it is pretty sure that the original article will not appear again on another news-server. If you disable zombies using this setting for a general purpose news-server, and the article becomes available again from some other news-server before it is actually removed from the article database, it will remain deleted. Zombies are still created when invalid news-server references are deleted from the article database.
comment=string1 comment=string2 ...	#...	A comment for the news-server. This setting can be repeated, to create multiline comments.
	N	The flag can be displayed, but there is no corresponding setting. The news-server most probably does not allow posting, at least this is what the welcome message says.
	P	The flag can be displayed, but there is no corresponding setting. The news-server probably allows posting, at least this is what the welcome message says.

Main news-server

The main news-server is used for posting articles by default. Additionally, the NPPOSTSERVER command can be used to change the posting news-server globally at any time, or to view the current selection.

If you do not select any news-server as main, NewsPlex will consider all the news-servers as equivalent, explore them simultaneously, and number articles starting from 1 up.

[proxies] section

The simplest way of defining proxies is to do this individually for each news-server, using server.privateProxy= settings in [server] sections.

Otherwise, you can define proxies globally. This allows to use the same proxy for several news-servers, at the inconvenience of having to give them unique numbers.

In this second case, first, define a [proxies] section, and put inside the list of proxies you intend to use, with entries like this:

url=proxy-url,proxy-group-number

The proxy-url must start with the proxy type, either none, or socks5://, or socks5b://, or socks4://, or socks4b://, or https://, or tunnel://, or sun://.

none means that no proxy should be used and the connection can be established directly. This is the default way of connecting to news-servers.

If the type is not none, the proxy-url should then specify the name of the proxy server and potentially its port as well as the login and the password if necessary. The default ports are:

Port	Proxy types
1080	socks5 socks5b socks4 socks4b
443	https
3666	sun

By default no login or password information is sent.

tunnel proxies are proxies which only allow to access a single machine, and which connect to it automatically after being connected to. Since they appear just like normal news-servers, they can be specified instead of news-servers in the etc\servers.ini file. However, if a given news-server can be accessed through several such proxies, it is interesting to define them as tunnel proxies instead, because this will make NewsPlex try them in sequence when connecting to the news-server. Note that unless one of the proxies specified is not none, the original news-server will not be contacted directly anymore, so its name will not matter. Tunnel proxy URLs have the default port equal to the port of the URL to which they are used to connect.

The proxy-group-number must be a small integer number. It allows to identify a proxy and to reference it from a news-server entry. The default proxy-group-number is 0.

Note: socks5b servers are buggy socks5 servers and socks4b servers are buggy socks4 servers. If you observe that NewsPlex is unable to connect at NNTP level to any news-server, and the logs\results file shows truncated welcome messages from them, with missing first 6 chars (eg. instead of 200 newsservername... you see wsservername..., and instead of 502 You are not allowed to talk you see u are not allowed to talk, use socks5b instead of socks5 and socks4b instead of socks4 to define the type of your proxy.

For each news-server entry, it is possible to reference the proxy in the server-url by appending a final ,proxy-group-number to it. By default, value 0 is assumed. To quickly modify a config\servers file used on a direct Internet connection so that it can be used on a proxy-ized Intranet connection, just add an initial line defining proxy 0. Example:

[proxies]
url=socks5://login:pass@socksproxy:1080,0
url=proxy none,1
url=proxy sun://oursunproxy,2

[server]
url=news1.yourisp.com,0
comment=news-server outside, will go through proxy 0

[server]
url=mylogin:mypass@companyserver,1
comment=news-server on local network, no proxy

[server]
url=news3.yourisp.com:4000,0
comment=another outside news-server, use proxy 0

[server]
url=news4.someisp.com,2
comment=go through sun proxy 2 to reach this

If no proxy is defined in proxy group 0, NewsPlex will automatically assume a direct connection for this proxy group, that is, create an implicit proxy none,0 entry. This allow to not define any proxies in the config\servers file if the connection is always direct.

Proxy groups

NewsPlex will use the first proxy defined in a given proxy group, except if the news-server indicates that it does not allow additional connections from this proxy (or from your host, if the proxy is none).

In such a case, NewsPlex will try to use the next proxy from the same proxy group, so that the news-server thinks a different news-reader is connecting. NewsPlex will also try to use a different proxy from the same proxy group if the current proxy indicates that it does not authorize establishing the NNTP connection. Finally, NewsPlex will try to use another proxy if the first one could not be connected to. NewsPlex will not try to use another proxy if the news-server is simply not reachable from the first proxy in a proxy group.

[proxychain] sections

To deal with this situation, NewsPlex supports proxy chains. This means that it can use a proxy to reach another proxy, and then use this second proxy to actually connect to a news-server.

After proxies have been defined in the etc\servers.ini file, you can chain them using the proxychain directive:

[proxies]
url=socks5://intranetproxy,0
url=socks5://externalproxy,1

[proxychain]
proxyGroup=0
proxyGroup=1

[server]
url=news.somedomain.com,0

Only two components are allowed in proxy chains. A single proxy group can appear only once in the first position of a proxy chain.

If the second proxy group has several proxies, only the first one defined will be used. However, all proxies in the first group will be tried if necessary.

Proxy chains are longer to establish and slower in operation than ordinary proxy-based connections, which themselves are worse than direct connections. They also require that the first proxy does not forbid connecting to the second one. In the above example, intranetproxy must allow connecting to port 1080 on externalproxy.

The etc\newsplex.ini file

Do not edit this file while NewsPlex is running with the shutdown.updateNewsplexIni= setting, because your modifications would be overwritten.

In the description below, boolean settings are shown with their non-default (active) values.

[async] section: Asynchronous retrieval settings

[access] section: Access settings

[clients] section: Client related settings

[connect] section: Connection control settings

[general] section: General settings

[groups] section: Group pre-selection

		yes=*midi*
		yes=*music*
	

		noByName=alt.music.boring
		noByName=alt.midi.lame
	

		noByPattern=*.alcohol*
		noByPattern=*.cigarettes*
	

[explore] section: Server exploration setting

[startup] section: Startup settings

[shutdown] section: Shutdown settings

Zombie and Phoenix articles

If a zombie article is requested, NewsPlex behaves like for requests for articles residing on unreachable news-servers. It returns the same error code, but with a specific message (500 Article is a zombie) by default. If renumbering is activated, NewsPlex pretends that the article has been deleted (which is actually true here) and renumbers it, so that if the article becomes available again, it is perceived as a new article by the news-reader.

It is also possible to specify the attemptMsgId= setting for specific news-servers, which will make NewsPlex attempt to always retrieve articles from them, even if they never said they had the article or even the news-group.

Files and directories

Filename	Description
async	The async directory is used when asynchronous article retrieval is enabled. It stores both control files and the articles themselves.
async\xxxxxxxx.bad	The async\xxxxxxxx.bad files, where x are hexadecimal digits, are articles which could not be retrieved completely because of temporary errors. These files always have a size greater than zero, otherwise they are not kept. During the next article retrieval attempt, they will be deleted and replaced with async\xxxxxxxx.ok files.
async\xxxxxxxx.del	The async\xxxxxxxx.del files, where x are hexadecimal digits, are produced instead of async\xxxxxxxx.ok files if an article could not be retrieved, for example because it has been deleted from all news-servers. async\xxxxxxxx.del files contain only an error message from NewsPlex, formatted as a news article. These files are deleted just like async\xxxxxxxx.ok files after a news-reader has requested them. You can delete them manually at any time if you want.
async\xxxxxxxx.log	The async\xxxxxxxx.log files, where x are hexadecimal digits, are logs of asynchronous article retrievals. They exist only while the article retrieval is in progress and when it completes, they are appended to the logs\summary file.
async\xxxxxxxx.ok	The async\xxxxxxxx.ok files, where x are hexadecimal digits, are asynchronously retrieved articles. They are also visible in the async news-group generated by NewsPlex locally. They are deleted 300 seconds after having been successfully retrieved for the first time by a news-reader. If they are requested again in the meantime, the deletion is delayed accordingly. You can also delete them manually at any time if you want. This allows to retrieve articles several times, which is useful when news-readers do not cache them, and also allows to better deal with errors (eg. disk space exhaustions) occurring when transferring multi-part postings. news-readers might discard parts already retrieved if an error occurs for the current part, even if for NewsPlex they were retrieved correctly and hence scheduled for deletion. If an article could not be retrieved, for example because it has been deleted from all news-servers, then a async\xxxxxxxx.del file is produced instead. Note that any async\xxxxxxxx.ok file, where x are hexadecimal digits and where the first digit is not a zero, copied into the async directory, will be visible in the async news-group and can be retrieved from a news-reader. After the first successful retrieval, it will be scheduled for deletion as described above.
async\xxxxxxxx.tmp	The async\xxxxxxxx.tmp files, where x are hexadecimal digits, are asynchronously retrieved articles in progress. After the article retrieval is finished, articles are renamed to async\xxxxxxxx.ok and visible in the async news-group generated by NewsPlex.
connect	The connect directory stores logs of connection activities performed on news-servers. Since NewsPlex serializes connection attempts, only one file needs to be used for a given news-server. Log files are named after news-servers; see the description for the newsrc2 directory for format details. Once files grow over a certain size, they are renamed into .bak and a new file is started. The previous .bak file is deleted.
dataset2	The dataset2 directory contains these parts of article descriptions which do not need to be loaded into memory all the time during operations. There is one file for each news-group offered by NewsPlex. Each file has one line per article. It describes the article and has the following fields: article number subject originator information date Message-ID article threading references number of bytes in article number of lines in article Do not put foreign files into this directory. They would be taken for news-group files, and NewsPlex could decide to "fix" or purely delete them if they do not follow a certain format.
etc	The etc directory hosts the various output files that NewsPlex produces and sometimes reuses.
etc\done	The etc\done file contains the list of asynchronously retrieved articles which have been completely processed. It is deleted, together with the etc\scheduld file, after all articles have been processed. Lines in the etc\done file have the same format as lines in the etc\scheduld file, except more status codes are possible: Code Meaning 3 Retrieval finished ok 4 Error, group does not exist anymore 5 Error, article is no more available 7 Error, article has been deleted 10 Error, article download has been cancelled
etc\filters.ini	This file is used for article filtering, with the server.filterArticles= setting, with the NPFILTER command and with the startup.filterAll= setting in etc\newsplex.ini. This file contains only [filter] sections, each one defining a single filter. A sample etc\filters.ini is automatically created at NewsPlex startup if it does not yet exist. The following settings can be used inside sections. If a setting is not defined, the corresponding field in article descriptions will not be examined. Empty filters, for example resulting from having two consecutive [filter] lines, would cover all articles, and are hence ignored. Wild-cards (*, ? and character sets and intervals, eg. [0-9a-z] or [!;,]) can be used in patterns. Note that patterns must cover the entire field, so they will often start and end with a star (*). Setting Description from=pattern Pattern for the From: field of articles. Can be repeated. msgId=pattern Pattern for the Message-ID field of articles. Can be repeated. subject=pattern Pattern for the Subject: field of articles. Can be repeated. groups=pattern Pattern for the Newsgroups: field of articles. Can be repeated. comment=string Comment for the pattern, just for your information. Can be repeated. disabled=1 Disables the pattern. hide=1 The pattern causes the hiding of the article. The article remains in the article database, but NewsPlex will pretend it has been deleted. linesMin=value linesMax=value Defines the minimum and maximum number of lines in the articles to be filtered out. bytesMin=value bytesMax=value Defines the minimum and maximum number of bytes in the articles to be filtered out. daysTooOld=value Filters all articles whose Date: is older than value days. Example file: [filter] comment=This is a comment from=annoying@annoying.com msgId=<*@annoying.com> msgId=<*@unwanted.com>   [filter] comment=This filter would cover everything and will be ignored   [filter] from=lamer*@lamers.com msgId=<lamers*@*lamers.com>   [filter] comment=Filter out old reposts subject=REPOST:* daysTooOld=40   [filter] comment=Filter out small zip files in alt.* groups. No, after all subject=*.zip* linesMax=10 groups=alt.* disabled=1
etc\groups	The etc\groups file contains the full list of news-groups managed by NewsPlex. Each line records information about a single news-group, and contains: a unique news-group number the date at which the news-group has been added to the file the name of the news-group You can (currently) delete this file when NewsPlex is not running, in order to get rid of news-group names which do not exist on any news-server anymore, yet match the groups.yes= settings (news-groups which do not match the current groups.yes= settings are ignored when NewsPlex reads this file). NewsPlex will reconstruct the file when it is run again. This only introduces a minor penalty that names of all news-groups will be returned if later a news-reader asks for just new news-groups.
etc\hidden	If the general.hiddenLog= setting in etc\newsplex.ini is set, NewsPlex stores in the etc\hidden file the Message-ID fields of all the articles which have been hidden as the result of the application of filters. This file is also used when the startup.applyHidden= setting is specified in etc\newsplex.ini (see section below).
etc\newsplex.ini	This is the main configuration file for NewsPlex. It is documented in detail in a separate chapter.
etc\popular.ini	The etc\popular.ini file records news-group popularity, which is measured by the total number and size of articles retrieved from them. Since version 4.0 this is a .ini file. It currently contains [group] sections only. When exploring a news-server, NewsPlex first asks for the most popular news-groups, but it also takes into account the last exploration date for each news-group. This avoids starvations with unpopular news-groups if a news-server often becomes unavailable before an exploration completes. The different settings are: Setting Description articlesGot number of articles requested kiloBytesGot total size in kilobytes of these articles lastGotSecs date of last article retrieval expressed in seconds since 1/1/1970 lastGroupSecs date of last news-group selection (not necessarily activation), expressed in seconds since 1/1/1970 groupName name of the news-group The content of this file is also accessible thru the Web interface. Note that this file can contain historical groups, no more active or even no more allowed by groups.yes= settings in etc\newsplex.ini.
etc\retrievd	If the general.retrievedLog= setting in etc\newsplex.ini is set, NewsPlex stores in the etc\retrievd file the Message-ID fields of all the articles which have been successfully retrieved by news-readers. This file is also used when the startup.applyRetrievd= setting is specified in etc\newsplex.ini (see section below).
etc\scheduld	The etc\scheduld file contains the list of articles which are being retrieved asynchronously. It is deleted, together with the etc\done file, after all articles have been processed. Each line in the etc\scheduld file has the following fields: article handle status code (always 0, meaning queued) news-group name article number article Message-ID number of bytes in article article Subject:
etc\servers.ini	This is the news-server list for NewsPlex. It is documented in detail in a separate chapter.
explore	The explore directory stores the log files resulting from the exploration of news-servers. Log files are named after news-servers; see the description for the newsrc2 directory for format details. Each news-server exploration has the same scenario, which is logged into the file: NewsPlex asks for news-groups matching groups.yes= settings. This is done if the previous request is more than 24 hours old or if the etc\newsplex.ini file has been modified since (if shutdown.updateNewsplexIni is not set), otherwise NewsPlex just requests new news-group names. NewsPlex produces a resulting list of interesting news-groups. The first column is the number of articles, the 2nd column indicates whether the news-group is active, the 3rd column is news-group name, followed by highest and lowest available article numbers and by the posting status of the news-group (y=yes, n=no, m=moderated). This listing is only produced if the groups.yes= settings does not request all news-groups or if the news-server does not have many news-groups. If any of the news-groups on the news-server are active, NewsPlex produces a separate list for them. NewsPlex displays which news-groups have vanished compared to the previous run. Note that because of the way in which news-group activation is implemented today, NewsPlex can sometimes indicate at the next normal exploration of the news-server that certain groups have vanished from it, while in fact the news-server never had them. This is due to the fact sometimes it is not possible to decide about the existence of a news-group on a specific news-server at the activation time. NewsPlex explores each news-group, using the newsrc2, index and update files to avoid retrieving the same article descriptions twice. It also leverages the statistics from the etc\popular.ini file to explore the most popular news-groups first. Groups which have never been visited are explored in a round-robin order, thanks to the time-stamp info from the newsrc2 file. At the end, NewsPlex displays how many connections were performed, the number of bytes sent and received, and when the next exploration will be done. This directory is preserved when NewsPlex terminates. The files inside can be deleted at any time, except when locked by NewsPlex because used. If a log file grows over 102400L bytes, a new file is opened when the next exploration starts, and the existing file name is added the .bak extension. The previous .bak file is deleted.
index	The index directory contains these parts of article descriptions which need to be loaded into memory during operations. There is one file for each news-group offered by NewsPlex. Each file has one line per article. It describes the article and has the following fields: article number article unique message identifier list of news-servers having the article and the corresponding article numbers flags Flag Meaning A Article has been scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval. H Article has been hidden. NewsPlex will pretend it is not there. N Article has been renumbered at level 2. NewsPlex will alter the Message-ID of the article when a news-reader requests it. Note that if an article is renumbered at level 1, ie. without changing the Message-ID, no special flag is set for it. R Article has already been retrieved by some news-reader. Do not put foreign files into this directory. They would be taken for news-group files, and NewsPlex could decide to "fix" or purely delete them if they do not follow the above format.
journal	The journal file logs certain events and conditions as NewsPlex runs, like incoming connections from news-readers. This file is renamed to journal.bak each time NewsPlex is started and this file is over 204800L bytes long. The previous journal.bak, if any, is deleted. When NewsPlex terminates, it prints into the journal file some summary information about the usage of news-servers during the session, similar to the results of the NPSERVERS command.
list	The list directory temporarily stores the full news-group listings from news-servers which cannot return news-groups matching patterns. It is automatically destroyed when NewsPlex exits.
logs	The logs directory hosts the various output files that NewsPlex produces but does not reuse. Its content can be deleted at any time.
logs\cli-host-port	The logs\cli-host-port files log commands issued by your news-reader and the responses it got. They notably contain the full content of posted articles. host is either the name of the machine from where the news-reader connected, or the IP address if the name could not be found, while port is the IP port number the news-reader is using. Once a news-reader has disconnected, the contents of its logs\cli-host-port file are appended to logs\clients and the logs\cli-host-port file is deleted.
logs\clients	The logs\clients file logs closed sessions from news-readers. It can be deleted at any time. If it grows over 100000L bytes, a new file is started, and the existing file name is added the .bak extension. The previous .bak file is deleted.
logs\compact	The logs\compact file logs database compacting activity. A compaction is scheduled to start 10 minutes after NewsPlex startup, and is performed every 300 minutes later. The logs\compact file can be deleted at any time. If it grows over 10000 bytes, a new file is opened when the next compaction starts, and the existing file name is added the .bak extension. The previous .bak file is deleted.
logs\intruder	The logs\intruder file logs rejected incoming connections. For each connection, the date, the IP address, the IP port and the host-name are stored. The file can be deleted at any time, but you better check from time to time who tries to use your NewsPlex without authorization.
logs\results	The logs\results file indicates the exploration results for news-servers. Each line has this format: server-url [flags] # result (comment) This file is kept when NewsPlex terminates. It can be deleted at any time. This file has the same format as the old raw config\servers file. If you have defined proxies for accessing the news-servers, they are copied into this file when it is created.
logs\summary	The logs\summary file stores the log of asynchronous article retrievals. Both successful and unsuccessful attempts are logged there after they have completed. For a given article, there can be several failed logs before the successful one. Or the last log can be a permanent failure, eg. article deletion from the article database. If it grows over 500000L bytes, a new file is started, and the existing file name is added the .bak extension. The previous .bak file is deleted.
logs\unusable	The logs\unusable file is only created in Minimal mode (explore.minimal in etc\newsplex.ini). It contains the logs of news-server explorations for all news-servers which did not have any interesting news-groups or which could not be contacted at all. It can be deleted at any time.
logs\web-host-port	The logs\web-host-port files are similar to logs\cli-host-port files, except they are used for Web browser sessions. Once a Web browser has disconnected, the contents of its logs\web-host-port file are appended to logs\web and the logs\web-host-port file is deleted.
logs\web	The logs\web file has the same purpose as the logs\clients file, except it collects the logs of past Web sessions.
newsrc2	The newsrc2 directory contains one file per news-server used. It logs which active news-groups have been explored on the news-server and which article descriptions have been retrieved from them. The file does not store information about non-active news-groups on the news-server. The names of files are normally equal to news-server names, but if there is a login or a non-standard port specified for a news-server, the server-disk-name will include them as well, using the [login@]server-name[_port] syntax, so that it is possible to eg. use several news-servers located on the same host. Note that invalid characters in the resulting filename are replaced with underscores. The newsrc2 directory is not called newsrc, like in versions of NewsPlex older than 3.0, so that your article databases are not corrupted if by accident you run a version of NewsPlex older than 3.0 in the directory containing 3.0 and later style article database files. It will simply create and start filling the database and newsrc directories, which you can safely delete after stopping the program. Then you can start the correct version of NewsPlex. The format of the files in the newsrc2 directory and the information in them are not quite the same as for the newsrc or .newsrc files used by news-readers. Lines starting with a tab contain the name of a news-group and the date of its last exploration, while the other lines contain the ranges of article numbers for which article descriptions have already been retrieved. If the news-group is empty on the news-server, there will be no numbers for it. You can delete a file corresponding to a news-server to force NewsPlex to retrieve the full article list for each news-group at the next exploration of the news-server. This will however almost certainly create dangling references in the article database. Such dangling references can be removed with the NPCHECKGROUPS command, preferably after the news-server has been re-explored.
news.htm	The news.htm file contains a Web redirection to NewsPlex's news-server. By opening it with a Web browser, you should get your news-reader started and connecting to NewsPlex. It is created at startup and deleted at shutdown. JavaScript must be enabled in the Web browser. Note that the login and password are not currently passed in the news.htm link.
news.url	The news.url file contains an Internet Explorer link to NewsPlex's news-server. By opening it with Internet Explorer, you should get a news-reader session with NewsPlex. It is created at startup and deleted at shutdown. Note: some news-readers, like Outlook Express, do not recognize the port specification in the URL, so if you run NewsPlex on a non-default port, you will need some tweaking to get them to connect. Note also that the login and password are not currently passed in the news.url link.
panic	The panic file is created if NewsPlex detects an non-recoverable internal error. Once a short message has been logged into this file, NewsPlex exits.
telnet.htm	The telnet.htm file contains a Web redirection to NewsPlex's telnet port. By opening it with a Web browser, you should get a telnet session with NewsPlex. It is created at startup and deleted at shutdown. JavaScript must be enabled in the Web browser.
telnet.url	The telnet.url file contains an Internet Explorer link to NewsPlex's telnet port. By opening it with Internet Explorer, you should get a telnet session with NewsPlex. It is created at startup and deleted at shutdown.
update	The update directory contains updates to index files. NewsPlex now avoids rewriting index files each time they are modified and instead appends new article descriptions to them and stores updates to existing article descriptions into update files. When update files grow too large, or if the index files are small, index files are rewritten and the update files are deleted.
web.htm	The web.htm file contains a Web redirection to NewsPlex's Web page. By opening it with a Web browser, you should get to NewsPlex's web page. It is created at startup and deleted at shutdown. JavaScript must be enabled in the Web browser.
web.url	The web.url file contains an Internet Explorer link to NewsPlex's Web page. By opening it with Internet Explorer, you should get to NewsPlex's web page. It is created at startup and deleted at shutdown.
xhdr	The xhdr directory temporarily stores the results of individual XHDR requests issued to news-servers for which the emulateXoverUsingXhdr= setting has been set. Hosted files are named using the server-disk-name_xhdr-request-name pattern (see the description of newsrc2 directory for explanations about server-disk-names). They are deleted when no more needed. The directory is automatically destroyed when NewsPlex exits.

Commands

Although the STAT command could be executed entirely locally, it actually goes to news-servers in order to allow validating the availability of an article.

The XHDR command has been extended.

• If passed the NPSERVREFS argument, it will display the news-server references for articles in current news-group, in the server-number:articlenumber form.
• If passed the NPSUBJECT argument, it will display the article numbers and subjects in the current news-group just like XHDR SUBJECT, but prefixing subjects with the retrieved and marked for asynchronous article retrieval indicators when applicable. See the Remembering retrieved articles chapter below for an explanation about these indicators.

NewsPlex also adds a few commands of its own, which are not intended for usage by news-readers but rather by an operator. These commands can be entered after performing telnet localhost 119 on your computer. They can also be performed using the provided NpNNTP utility. The HELP command does not display them if the user is unprivileged.

The Web browser interface, active by default since version 4.0, allows to perform all administrative commands available by telnet, plus a few of its own. The pages are not currently documented. If the default Web port is used, connect your Web browser to URL http://localhost:8000 or load/start either the web.htm or the web.url file.

Command	Web	Description
NPACCESSED	Yes	Display which news-groups are currently being accessed by news-readers or are being updated. The following information is displayed for each news-group: Number of users Number of articles Whether it has been modified since having been read from disk The number of threads waiting to access the news-group Flags: Flag Meaning B Busy, still loading E Error, not accessible L Loaded ok Name
NPACTIVE	Yes	Like LIST, but displays only active news-groups.
NPAPPLYHIDDEN	Yes	Read the etc\hidden file and mark as hidden in all news-groups all articles whose Message-IDs are listed inside. Equivalent to the startup.applyHidden= setting in etc\newsplex.ini.
NPAPPLYRETRIEVD	Yes	Read the etc\retrievd file and mark as read in all news-groups all articles whose Message-IDs are listed inside. Equivalent to the startup.applyRetrievd= setting in etc\newsplex.ini.
NPASYNC [min-lines]	Yes	Enable asynchronous article retrieval for articles longer than min-lines lines and which seem to contain binaries (NewsPlex looks at article subjects to decide about that, using the async.binaryFilter= settings). If min-lines is preceded with a minus, all articles longer than min-lines are retrieved asynchronously. Passing min-lines of 0 disables asynchronous article retrieval, but does not stop article retrievals already scheduled. The NPASYNC command also displays the list of articles which are being retrieved asynchronously, followed by a line giving their count and total number of bytes.
NPCANCEL article-number [article-number ...]	Yes	Cancel the retrieval of one or more articles scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval. Each article-number can be provided either in decimal form or in hexadecimal form (with a 0x prefix). It is not necessary to select the async news-group first.
NPCHECKGROUPS mode	Yes	Check the article database for coherency with the newsrc2 files and optionally remove dangling news-server references. Such references can appear if NewsPlex is brutally killed before having saved modifications done to an index file, while corresponding modifications done to the newsrc2 file have already been saved (the opposite situation simply makes NewsPlex retrieve some article descriptions again, as regets). mode specifies the operation mode: 0 - check only, silent mode 1 - check only, verbose mode 2 - fix errors, silent mode 3 - fix errors, verbose mode If a news-server is being explored when this command is entered, no checking will be performed for it. Starting with version 3.0, NPCHECKGROUPS also deletes the index and dataset2 files corresponding to unwanted news-groups.
NPCLIENTS	Yes	Display the list of currently connected client news-readers and Web browsers. For each client, the following information is displayed: Connection type, N for news-readers and W for Web browsers Socket number (a unique identifier for the connection) The IP address of the client The IP port of the client The host-name of the client The time the client came in Whether the current group's index is loaded into memory. The current group for the client. The current article number in the group, or -1 if there is none. The calling connection is marked with an asterisk in the last column.
NPCLOSE server-number	Yes	Close all idle connections to a given news-server. If no server-number is provided or if it is 0, all idle news-server connections are closed.
NPCONNECTED	Yes	Display the list of open news-server connections along with the state and purpose. This can be either for exploring or for retrieving an article on news-reader request. Connections are maintained a few minutes even when idle, so as to minimize the time necessary to re-use a news-server. For each connection, the following information is displayed: ID of the news-server Connection status: Letter Meaning   Idle A Direct asynchronous article retrieval C Connecting D Dead E Explore K Being kept-alive R Direct article retrieval T Terminating V Server-available asynchronous article retrieval For how long the connection has been in this state How many times this connection has been used, including the current one (if Used) Number of bytes sent to news-server Number of bytes received from news-server Name of the news-server Current group on news-server, if any Last error string
NPDATASETS	Yes	Display the usage information of the files in the dataset2 directory. For each active dataset, the following information is displayed: the number of users the number of users waiting for exclusive access whether the dataset file is open flags Flag Meaning B Busy E File pointer is at end how many times the file has been opened. This number should be always 1 for now, except for the (history) entry the number of seeks performed in the dataset file the number of gets (line reads) from the dataset file the number of find operations the number of record additions the number of errors the name of the news-group The last table line, where the news-group name is (history), shows cumulative usage information for no more active datasets. The last displayed line shows: the total number of datasets opened till now the total number of reused datasets the number of freed datasets the number of dataset access errors
NPDEACTIVATE	Yes	Deactivate the current news-group. The dataset2, index and update files will be deleted, and NewsPlex will consider that the group has never been activated. Note: Because, for now, the newsrc2 files are cleaned off non-active news-groups at next exploration only, it is better to shutdown NewsPlex before re-activating a news-group, or the news-group will not be re-populated with news-server references correctly.
NPDELETEOLD days	Yes	Delete article descriptions older than days days in all news-groups. Articles which do not have a recognizable Date will be kept. Note that NewsPlex does recognize some non-English formats and can parse post-1999 dates where the year is noted with one or two digits only, eg. 0, 00, 01, etc. No zombies are created; article descriptions are deleted directly. Note that article descriptions are normally automatically removed from the database when corresponding articles vanish from news-servers (after the expiration of the zombie period). The NPDELETEOLD command allows to trim the article database in case news-servers forget to expire some of their old articles. See also the explore.daysTooOld= setting in etc\newsplex.ini and the server.daysTooOld= setting in etc\servers.ini.
NPDELETESERVER server-number	Yes	This command currently deletes article database news-server references to the specified news-server. It does not make NewsPlex stop attempting to use the news-server. If a news-server becomes unusable, as the explore\server-disk-name file indicates, you can delete it from NewsPlex using NPDELETESERVER server-number. NPGLOBALSTATS will then not show any articles for it anymore. Then you can delete it from the etc\servers.ini file (or set the server.disabled= setting for it) and restart NewsPlex. This command even allows to delete a news-server which is no more present in the etc\servers.ini file. For example, if you removed the entry, but did not perform NPDELETESERVER first.
NPEXPLORESERVER server-number	Yes	Explore a news-server immediately rather than waiting till its time comes. This command is also useful if NewsPlex has been started with automatic exploration disabled (the explore.explore= setting set to 0). Note that the news-server will be only explored once.
NPFILTER	Yes	Apply filters from etc\filters.ini to current news-group. After selecting a news-group with the GROUP name command, you can enter NPFILTER to apply the current set of filters from the etc\filters.ini file to this group. No zombies are created; article descriptions are deleted directly. See also the startup.filterAll= setting in etc\newsplex.ini and the server.filterArticles= setting in etc\servers.ini.
NPFORCETASK handle [handle ...]	Yes	Force the immediate execution of one or more tasks, which otherwise would be executed later. One can force an asynchronous article retrieval this way.
NPGLOBALSTATS	Yes	Display provider stats for all news-groups. NewsPlex will display for each news-server how many articles it has and how many of them are unique. If a given news-server does not appear in the list, NewsPlex has no articles from it.
NPGROUPSTATS	Yes	Display provider stats for the current news-group. After selecting a news-group with the GROUP name command, you can enter NPGROUPSTATS to see the news-servers which contain articles for this news-group.
NPMARKRETRIEVED article-number	-	Mark article article-number in the current news-group as retrieved (see section below).
NPPOSTSERVER [server-number]	Yes	Define a news-server as the default posting news-server. This command can be used to dynamically change the news-server set by the etc\servers.ini file. This is a global setting, valid for the current and all other connections. Without argument, this command displays the current default posting news-server. With argument 0, it disables posting.
NPREFRESH news-group-name	Yes	Start exploring the indicated specific news-group on all news-servers. Use this command if you feel you need to refresh NewsPlex's idea about it. Note that this command does not activate the news-group implicitly.
NPRENUMBER level	Yes	This command helps dealing with unavailable news-servers (asynchronous article retrieval is another way). If no news-server having an article is reachable, by default NewsPlex will send to the news-reader 500 No server having article is reachable Some news-readers however do not like this message and do not request further articles, or even disconnect. If NPRENUMBER is activated, but is not at level 3, NewsPlex will instead send 423 no such article number in this news-group which makes the news-reader think the article has simply been deleted. Most news-readers will continue retrieving other articles correctly. NewsPlex will however create a new reference for the article which will be seen by the news-readers the next time they asks for new articles. There are 2 possible ways for creating this new reference: Moving the article under a new number (NPRENUMBER 1). This is clean, but some news-readers check for cross-posted articles using Message-IDs and will ignore articles which have the same Message-ID as an old article, even if this old article has been signaled as deleted previously. Also changing the Message-ID (NPRENUMBER 2). This allows to deal with the previous issue. NewsPlex also alters the Message-ID to make the article look new. However, the article will not appear in the correct place in the thread to which it belongs: it will lose its followups. If level 3 is requested and the article cannot be provided, NewsPlex will send a "timeout" notice and close the connection to the news-reader. It is possible to revert to the normal operation by sending NPRENUMBER 0.
NPREWRITEGROUP	Yes	Integrate the content of the update file into the index file for the current group, and delete too old zombies. This command is useful for quickly trimming a news-group, notably after setting a shorter NPZOMBIEDAYS value.
NPRESTART	Yes	Shutdown NewsPlex and restart it immediately. Read-only configuration files will be re-read. The original command-line options will remain active. Once the NewsPlex welcome message is displayed again, it is possible to enter further commands. The previous context of the connection (current news-group, current article, etc.) is lost however.
NPSERVERS	Yes	Display information about the usage of news-servers. For each news-server, NewsPlex will display whether it has already taken article descriptions from it during the current session or was able to connect at all. Other information is the time since the last successful exploration (0 if none yet), the current speed, the number of articles and article bytes retrieved and the old-style flags (as in the etc\servers.ini file documentation above).
NPSHUT	Yes	Shutdown NewsPlex. NewsPlex will terminate. This command can take a while to execute, both because some operations are not easily interruptible, and because lots of data may need to be written to disk.
NPTASKS	Yes	Display the list of currently running and scheduled tasks. A task is something to do asynchronously and not necessarily immediately; tasks are categorized and only a limited number of tasks in the same category are performed in parallel. For each task are displayed: an internal task handle the time remaining until execution. For running or overdue tasks, the time since the task has been running or should have been running the state of the tasks: Wait Run Late the category of the task a description of the task In addition, a list of categories is displayed, and for each of them: the name of category the count of currently running tasks in category the maximum number of tasks for the category
NPTRIMPOPULAR days [evenRetrieved]	No	Allows to remove certain not really interesting news-group entries from the etc\popular.ini file. If only days are given, the command removes information about inactive news-groups from which articles have never been retrieved and which have not been accessed in days days. Certain news-readers occasionally issue hundreds or thousands of random GROUP requests, without ever activating the news-groups. The NPTRIMPOPULAR command allows to easily forget about that, after some time. If evenRetrieved is passed as second argument, even information about inactive news-groups from which articles were retrieved in the past is removed. Entries for active news-groups cannot be removed. If they somehow vanish, they will be recreated individually at the next article retrieval and globally at next startup or restart. There is no lower limit on days.
NPZOMBIEDAYS [zombiedays]	Yes	Equivalent to the general.zombieDays= setting in etc\newsplex.ini. Without argument, this command displays the current value only.

command-line options

Option	Description
-c	Delete empty files and directories and exit.
-C	Delete all created files and directories and exit. Use with caution. Only certains files in the etc directory will be preserved.
-m	Execute in minimal mode. See the description of the explore.minimal= setting for more details. Note that this command-line option will force the above setting in the etc\newsplex.ini file for next runs.
-d dir	Use directory dir as work directory for files, rather than the directory from which NewsPlex is started.
-h	NewsPlex will print a short help about command-line options and exit.
-i file	Import a list of news-server URLs from file and incorporate it into the etc\servers.ini file. A given news-server will be added only if it is not already present (as determined by the login name, the machine name and the port). This option is interesting in minimal mode, where it allows to pass a list of news-servers to explore. It can eg. be passed together with -m. Each news-server URL should be on a separate line. Empty lines and leading or trailing blanks are ignored. The news-server URL can optionally be followed, on the same line and separated by blanks, by one or more URLs of proxies. They become server.privateProxy= settings for the news-server. Note that the format of file is not the same as the previous raw news-server list format.
-sl pattern	List Windows services whose short or long names match pattern pattern.
-si	Install NewsPlex as a Windows service.
-sa	Start the NewsPlex service.
-sp	Pause the NewsPlex service.
-sc	Continue the NewsPlex service.
-so	Stop the NewsPlex service.
-su	Uninstall the NewsPlex service.
-v	Print name, version, copyright and exit.

Notes about asynchronous article retrieval

A direct download is performed by trying to download each article from all news-servers which apply. This method is also used when a news-reader requests an article synchronously.

A server-available download is attempted each time a news-server connection becomes idle (nobody requests a connection to this news-server at the moment), NewsPlex judges it is suitable for downloading the article (for example, the news-server must have declared having it) and the number of such downloads already running is less than the value of the async.serverAvailable= setting. Therefore, there are never any Late asyncav tasks.

This server-available method does not respect the categorization of news-servers and does not enter into the maximum value of asynchronous article retrievals set with the async.simultaneous= setting. It however does respect the configured maximum number of allowed open connections to each news-server. You should set the reuseForAsync= setting to 0 for news-servers which you do not want to be used for server-available asynchronous article retrievals. You can also disable these downloads globally by setting the async.serverAvailable= setting to 0.

Security and access control

If the access.otherComputers= setting is set, NewsPlex will allow NNTP and Web logins from any machine.

It is possible to protect both NNTP and Web access with passwords. The passwords are the same for both accesses.

Two login and password couples can be used to separately protect user and administrator access.

Web access is protected with the administrator login and password if an administrator login and password are set, and with the user login and password if the user login and password are set and the administrator login and password are not set. When the correct login and password are provided, all functions become available.

If the access.adminLogin= setting and the access.adminPass= setting are defined, administrator NNTP access will be protected and only standard commands will be available to users which did not provide the correct values. People will notably not be able to see what news-servers are used by NewsPlex.

If the access.userLogin= setting and the access.userPass= setting are defined, even normal user access will be protected and only the authentication command will be available until correct authentication data are provided.

If the access.user...= settings are defined but not the access.admin...= settings, every user will be privileged as soon as he logs in. By defining both the access.user...= settings and the access.admin...= settings, one can separately protect both normal user access and administrator access.

If a client news-reader does not have administrator access, retrieved article headers are stripped of Path: and Xref: entries, which give the identity of the news-servers from which the articles come. The Path: entry is useless normally and the Xref: entry mostly too, since it contains article numbers on the originating news-server rather than article numbers on NewsPlex. Note that in the asynchronous article retrieval case, the stripping is done on the fly, depending on the privilege of the news-reader, and the async\xxxxxxxx.ok files on disk are complete.

Adding and deleting news-servers

To delete a news-server, for example because it has been unusable for a certain time, first delete the article descriptions which still point to it, using the NPDELETESERVER command, then delete or comment out its entry in the config\servers file and restart NewsPlex.

Remembering retrieved articles

• unsubscribe and re-subscribe to a news-group and presumably lose the state information about it, or
• change your news-reader, or
• lose some of the news-reader configuration information, or
• use several news-readers at the same time, or
• add a new news-server containing old articles to the list (see below).

This feature is enabled by default starting from version 3.8. It can be controlled with the general.retrievedLog= setting, general.retrievedMark= setting and clients.retrievedShow= setting. It works as follows:

Each time you retrieve an article successfully, NewsPlex stores its Message-ID into the etc\retrievd file, and marks the article in the article database.

If a news-reader later requests a full list of articles for a news-group, it will get modified article descriptions: NewsPlex will add a "/r " prefix to the From: field of the article descriptions. If an article was previously from John Doe <john@doe.com> it will become an article from /r John Doe <john@doe.com>.

The articles themselves are not modified when they are actually retrieved.

Normally, news-readers only request new article descriptions, so they do not see the modified article descriptions unless they request everything.

The etc\retrievd file allows to keep the information even after the article has vanished from all news-servers where it was present (and the zombie has expired too, or zombies were not enabled), and hence the article description, containing the retrieved status has been deleted.

The startup.applyRetrievd=1 setting makes NewsPlex read the etc\retrievd file on startup or restart and mark as retrieved all the articles whose Message-IDs are listed in this file.

This setting is useful if you add a new news-server to the config\servers file and it has articles which you have already retrieved in the past, but which do not exist in the article database anymore. Except for the old date, such articles would appear as new. If the startup.applyRetrievd=1 is specified, NewsPlex will mark these old articles with "/r " and you will be able to avoid retrieving them again.

There is presently no way of doing the opposite, that is transferring the Message-IDs of previously retrieved articles from the article database into a file.

Migrating to NewsPlex version 3.5 or later from earlier releases

Versions starting with 3.5 do not import the data files of versions 3.4 and earlier, and will refuse to start if such files are present. There are currently no plans to provide this conversion in the future, because of differences in NewsPlex operation principles.

In order to migrate to version 3.5 manually, you could perform the following steps:

1. You can try the new auto-configuration feature and start NewsPlex without any config file and without any arguments, in an empty directory. NewsPlex should find some of your previously used news-servers and will assume you want all news-groups. This is fine, since news-groups are activated only when requested and handling the full news-group list is now very effective (although it does consume the RAM necessary to store all names; this will be improved in the future).

2. Conversely, you can import by hand some of the files from an older NewsPlex setup:

   File	Purpose
   config\groups.yes	If you want to limit the memory usage and are not interested in the full group list
   config\servers	If you have additional news-servers
   config\filters	If you defined some filters previously
   etc\retrievd	If you want to retain the information about which article have been read

   Do not keep the config\groups.no or the config\groups.fix files, as they as no more necessary. config\groups.no now just hides groups and consumes additional memory for groups which might not even exist anymore. config\groups.fix is no more used at all.

3. Once NewsPlex has been started, leave some time until all news-servers have been explored initially and their status becomes Done. As this is a fresh start, and no news-group is active yet, this will be limited to getting just the news-groups list from each news-server and constructing the etc\groups file.

4. Now you need to activate the news-groups which interest you. You can just unsubscribe and immediately re-subscribe to every news-group you are interested in. Then, request new articles to activate the news-groups.

5. If you want to keep the "retrieved" status of articles:
   • perform the above steps as indicated
   • copy or move the etc\retrievd file from a previous version of NewsPlex into the etc directory. You can do this while NewsPlex is already running
   • for the 2nd time, unsubscribe and re-subscribe to every news-group. This time, do not enter them or request new "headers" (article descriptions) yet
   • wait until NewsPlex gets the article descriptions for every active group. This can take some time; watch the log files in the explore directory
   • perform the NPAPPLYRETRIEVD command, so that article descriptions of already read articles are marked with /r in the From: field
   • request headers for subscribed groups
   • delete or mark as read all articles which appear marked with /r in the From: field.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	"No problem"
1	"Help was printed"
2	"Bad option was passed"
3	"Missing work directory"
4	"Could not open the journal file"
5	"Another server already running on same port"
10	"Could not create the logs directory"
11	"Could not create the etc directory"
12	"Could not create the list directory"
13	"Could not create the explore directory"
14	"Could not create the async directory"
15	"Option -t not specified but disk is 8.3 only"
16	"Could not create the newsrc2 directory"
17	"Could not create the index directory"
18	"Could not create the dataset directory"
19	"Could not create the logs/unusable file"
20	"Error in the etc/servers.ini file"
21	"Error when processing the etc/groups file"
22	"Error when initializing asynchronous retrieval"
23	"Could not establish an NNTP server"
24	"Could not establish a Web server"
25	"Could not create async retrieval threads"
26	"Error when converting the databases"
27	"Shutdown requested during startup"
28	"Could not create the NNTP server thread"
29	"Could not create the Web server thread"
30	"Could not create the compaction task"
32	"Could not create the memory monitor task"
33	"Article noticed as corrupted during article free operation"
34	"Article noticed as corrupted during article save operation"
35	"Error during synchronization with main server"
36	"Internet not present"
37	"An async retrieval task could not be created"
38	"The log file for NNTP connection could not be created"
39	"The NPSHUT command has been performed"
40	"Cannot initialize the logs/clients file"
41	"Cannot initialize the logs/web file"
42	"Shutdown requested from the web interface"
43	"Shutdown requested by signal"
45	"Could not create the update directory"
46	"Article noticed as corrupted during Message-ID compare"
47	"Auto-configuration failed"
48	"Could not create the server update task"
49	"Automatic shutdown after exploring all servers in minimal mode"
50	"Could not read the etc/popular.ini file"
51	"Could not repair the article database"
52	"NNTP server and Web server ports not different"
53	"Internal restart requested from the web interface"
54	"Error when processing the etc/newsplex.ini file"
55	"Auto-configuration done"
56	"Error when importing servers from file"
57	"Internal restart on panic"
58	"Could not create the connect directory"
59	"Service shutdown"
60	"Service operation failed"

Installing NewsPlex on Windows desktop

Drag the NewsPlex icon onto the desktop from the directory where the distribution has been unpacked; this creates a shortcut for the program. Select Properties from the shortcut's right-mouse-button menu, click the Shortcut tab, find the Target input box and add a blank and all the necessary command-line options at the end of the command associated with the shortcut.

In the Start in input box enter the name of the work directory where you created the etc directory and the .ini files. You can also pass the name of this directory with the -d command-line option.

From the Run list, select Minimized to avoid Windows switching to full-screen when starting NewsPlex (this happens on Windows 95).

Since version 2.8, the NewsPlex executable has its own icon, but if you do not like it, use the dialog box associated with the Change Icon button to change the icon to something else.

Finally, you can rename the shortcut into NewsPlex, either from the right mouse button menu, if the Rename option is available there, or by changing the name of the shortcut file to NewsPlex.lnk. The shortcut file is located in the Desktop subdirectory of the Windows installation directory on Windows 95. On Windows NT, it is located in the Desktop directory of your profile. On Windows 2000 and XP, the Desktop directory is located in your user profile directory (indicated eg. by the USERPROFILE environment variable).

Web resources related to NewsPlex

There is currently no real NewsPlex web page, but there are a few places where either the latest Windows and Linux versions or user-contributed materials can be found. The http://newsplex.webstylists.com/download/ directory is the place where I currently upload new releases (courtesy of Mark Thompson). You can also check http://newsplex.webstylists.com/ directly in case I decide to start a real web page. Dave Warren offers a mirror of the files at http://www.intarnut.com/newsplex/, while Pavel Stratil (http://triceron.com) offered a page at http://triceron.com/project/newsplex. Andrew Starr proposes a page at http://www.newsreaders.com/link/newsplex.php. Check all these places if you feel the next release does not come soon enough!

Stable new Windows versions were in the past uploaded to the ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/simtelnet/news site (Simtel.Net), and sometimes to the http://www.winsite.com site (CICA). In the first case, an announcement was automatically posted to comp.archives.ms-windows.announce.

Stable new OS/2 versions were occasionally uploaded to the ftp://ftp-os2.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/apps/internet/news/server site.

The Solaris and FreeBSD versions can only be obtained from me directly, by email.

NewsPlex is sometimes mentioned or discussed in the news-groups ( alt.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent, news.software.readers, it.comp.software.newsreader and others). You can use http://groups.google.com/ and enter newsplex as search keyword to locate them (or simply click this link).

Joseph Morlan has started a Yahoo Group (mailing list with Web-access) dedicated to NewsPlex at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsPlex/ in December 2002.

More recently, a German-language NewsPlex discussion forum has been established at http://www.newsserverguide.de/thbboard/board.php?boardid=13

Some people maintain references to NewsPlex on their pages. There is also an Italian translation of the manual:

• http://newsplex.home.att.net
• http://voidhawk.net/newsplex
• http://www.vene.ws/news/nplex.asp
• http://web.tiscali.it/CercaManuali/a219.htm
• http://www.geocities.com/fashionavenue/1075

History of updates

Version 4.4 (20 November 2005)

In NpPlay

• Added a -N option (randomize), which changes the random sequence every time NpPlay is run.

In NpSync

• In synchronize mode (-S) we no more compare files in the reverse scan, which was pointless: unique files are deleted, the other ones are not considered.
• The -C option now makes NpSync skip files whose names contain characters invalid on Windows. This option can be helpful when syncing with a Unix filesystem mounted by NFS.

In NpTunnel

• Introduced 3 new settings:
  • reallyConnect= setting, if set to 0, makes NpTunnel not connect to the destination and just observe what the client requests or sends.
  • forwardLocalData= setting, if set to 0, makes NpTunnel not forward local client's data to the remote server. It will still log them, if requested.
  • returnRemoteData= setting, if set to 0, makes NpTunnel not return the data from the remote server back to local client. It will still log them, if requested.

In NewsPlex

• Introduced the access.maxNntp= setting and the access.maxWeb= setting which allow to define how many incoming client connections of each type are allowed.
• Introduced the access.nntpQueueRequests= setting and the access.webQueueRequests= setting which allow to define whether NewsPlex should wait till a "connection slot" becomes free in overload conditions or reject an incoming connection immediately.
  By default there is no waiting; this is a change from previous versions. Note that NewsPlex does not do a very good job of queuing. It will reject connections very soon. This setting is mostly there to allow reverting to the traditional behavior rather than to introduce a specific feature.
• Introduced the clients.logPostedBodies= setting, which allows to decide whether bodies of posted articles should be logged.
• A error in the etc\servers.ini file, for example a duplicated id= setting, would crash NewsPlex rather than just terminating with an error code. This problem appeared in the previous version.
• NewsPlex could crash if server-available asynchronous article retrievals were used together with the general.verbose= setting.
• NewsPlex would often improperly display the status of connections which were kept-alive as just idle.
• The connect.maxConnectTasks= setting is really named connect.maxTasks=
• Introduced the access.allowedIP= setting, the access.allowedHostName= setting and the access.hostNameRequired= setting which allow to better control who is allowed to connect to NewsPlex. The two first settings can be repeated, can contain wildcards and can also specify a rejection if the ! character is used at the beginning of the pattern.
• Changed the Too many EOFs in XOVER message in the logs into more accurate Too many EOFs in XOVER, XHDR or XPAT.
• Too old or filtered out articles are now indicated with a simple - in the logs rather than will a full article description dump, to save on file size.
• During the exploration of a news-group, in the Message-ID matching phase, NewsPlex would retry the same interval after an error. This was not suitable for the initial exploration of very large groups, which could never succeed in one go.
• When applying the etc\retrievd or etc\hidden files to news-groups, the timestamp was improperly displayed in the logs, between the news-group names and the application statuses.
• When exploring a yet unknown news-group on a news-server, NewsPlex will no more ask for article numbers before asking for number-to-Message-ID mappings. This served no useful purpose, yet slowed down the first exploration of a news-server.
• NewsPlex will now save the full active news-group list to the newsrc2 file (with 0 as last exploration timestamps) immediately after getting it from the news-server and before actually exploring the news-groups. Previously, the newsrc2 file was only updated as each news-group was explored and if the explore failed for some reason or was interrupted, the next time NewsPlex would only look at the news-groups previously explored. This would persist until the time to reget a full news-group list came.
• Fixed a problem where index or dataset2 could get corrupted with apparently correctly constructed but misnumbered lines. This resulted in Number not greater than previous error messages when the corresponding news-group was accessed.
  The problem only occurred on Windows and was due to the system ignoring and implicitly stripping trailing dots in filenames (Windows considers e.g. filename... and filename as the same file and if filename... is referenced, filename will be accessed implicitly). So if a news-group's name ended with one or more dots, then NewsPlex would actually access the files for the news-group without the trailing dots, and such parallel access would corrupt them on update. Now such news-group names are rejected as invalid.
• Introduced the groups.noByPattern= setting, which allows to exclude broad categories of news-groups by name patterns. The older groups.no= setting has been renamed to groups.noByName=.
• NewsPlex can now be installed as a Windows service (on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003), using the new -si command-line option. The newsplex.exe executable can also be used to start (-sa), stop (-so), pause (-sp), continue (-sc) and uninstall (-su) this service. The -sl pattern command-line option can be used to list Windows services whose names match the pattern.
• Added two new per-news-server settings allowing to properly explore some broken-by-design news-servers. The server.xhdrMessageIdAllowNumberNotGreater= setting makes NewsPlex stop requiring that the list of article number-Message-ID mappings returned by XHDR MESSAGE-ID has strictly progressing article numbers, while the server.xoverAllowNumberNotGreater= setting does the same for the list returned by XOVER.
• Introduced a clients.addPostedHeaderLeading= setting, a clients.addPostedHeaderTrailing= setting, a clients.addPostedBodyLeading= setting and a clients.addPostedBodyTrailing= setting, which allow to insert either header or body lines into posted articles, at either the first/leading or the last/trailing position, for example in order to identify postings.
• Fixed a problem with asynchronous article retrievals getting delayed without apparent reason in version 4.3, unless server-available asynchronous article retrievals (asyncav tasks) were disabled on news-servers where exploration was turned off.
  The problem was actually old, but remained latent as NewsPlex was not managing idle connections well enough. The server-available asynchronous article retrieval code tries to download an article if it is explicitly present on the news-server to which a connection has just become free. But this code was disturbing the normal direct asynchronous article retrieval, by pushing it one minute into the future if the news-server was not listed as having the article in the database.
  Previously server-available asynchronous article retrievals were only done after finishing exploring a news-server, after finishing downloading an article by number and after posting an article to the news-server. The news-server was necessarily explored in the first two cases, so the server-available asynchronous article retrievals had a good chance to find the article as "present on the server" in the database and to proceeed with the download. In 4.3, thanks to the introduction of "server waiting", NewsPlex could better decide when a connection was no more needed, so server-available asynchronous article retrievals were attempted in other circumstances as well. Most of the time server-available asynchronous article retrievals silently failed, pushing away direct asynchronous article retrievals in time.
  Now, we reschedule the direct asynchronous article retrievals at the originally scheduled time if a server-available asynchronous article retrieval fails.
• Shutting down NewsPlex just after activating many news-groups would generate a number of traces in the journal file, about not completed late explore tasks, and about users remaining for news-servers, approximately equal to 1 plus the number of not yet explored news-groups.

Version 4.3 (19 March 2005)

In NpTunnel

• NpTunnel is a new utility. It allows to automatically establish various kinds of tunnels accross the Internet when you connect to a port on the machine running NpTunnel.
• NpTunnel is driven by an nptunnel.ini configuration file. A sample file is generated at the first run, showing the various possibilities. All sample tunnels are initially disabled (tunnel.disabled= setting).
• Tunnels can involve going thru arbitrarily long proxy chains in order to reach the target server (tunnel.proxy= settings).
• Tunnels can be
  • either auto-dialing, where the simple fact of connecting to a port on the machine running NpTunnel connects you to another predefined machine (tunnel.localUrl= setting equal to telnet://localhost:port and tunnel.remoteUrl= setting equal to telnet://any-other-host:port)
  • or they can offer a SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 interface (tunnel.localUrl= setting equal to eg. socks5://localhost:port), allowing to dial anywhere. Both types of SOCKS connections are accepted indifferently, with one exception: if a login/password is defined for the interface, SOCKS4 connections are not accepted.
• Tunnels can be public or accessible only from the machine running NpTunnel (tunnel.otherComputers= setting).
• NpTunnel can login your automatically to a Unix machine by "typing in" your login name and password (tunnel.autoLogin= setting).
• NpTunnel can act as a proxy for an IRC program and automatically process "DCC SEND" requests issued by IRC file servers (tunnel.irc= setting).
• A special "piping" mode makes NpTunnel expect incoming connections on both ends of the tunnel and later route packets both ways (tunnel.piping= setting).
• Traffic can be logged to the per-connection log file (tunnel.logTraffic= setting), or separately, per source (tunnel.localLog= setting and tunnel.remoteLog= setting) or both.
• Logging can be either immediate (higher overhead), or slightly deferred, according to the tunnel.logSyncWrites= setting, the tunnel.localLogSyncWrites= setting and the tunnel.remoteLogSyncWrites= setting.
• It is possible to run in background (using the global.runInBackground= setting and the global.hideIfBackground= setting).

In NpSync

• NpSync is a new utility. It allows to compare and optionally synchronize two directory trees.

In NpPlay

• The new -n command-line option causes random playback of files, rather than a linear one. Each file will be played once (possibly repeated the number of times specified by the -l option, if passed) and the program will terminate.
  The set of files to play is determined at program startup, so adding a new file into the directory will not cause its playback until NpPlay is run again.
• NpPlay now watches system events like Ctrl-C keys or window close requests and stops playback and releases the multimedia device by itself, rather that relying on the system to cleanup properly, which could lead to some peripherals remaining "busy" until the computer was rebooted.
• The wildcard parser no longer accepts the [...] syntax (for sets and ranges of characters), as it prevented playback of single files whose name contained the [ character.

In NpRename

• Add the -u string command, which allows to globally remove unwanted strings from file names. Such strings could for example be the name of a Web site. It is possible to have blanks in string, if it is quoted using double-quotes (-u "some unwanted string").

In NpJPEG

• Add the -i command-line option, which allows to continue scanning the directory tree during recursive operations when some directories are not accessible.

In all utilities

• Fixed the scanning of directories, which could miss certain files or directories because of a bug in the mechanism which makes sure every file is only processed once.

In NewsPlex

• Introduced the async.serverAvailable= setting in order to allow tunning how many server-available asynchronous article retrievals are allowed.
• Fixed the NPFORCETASK command which only correctly processed its first argument.
• When an article was being hidden as the result of filtering, and the hiddenLog= setting was set, the etc\hidden file was not updated until shutdown. This prevented having the new Message-IDs seen by the NPAPPLYHIDDEN command.
• If the symbolic name of news-server could be resolved into an IP address, but this IP address could not be connected to, NewsPlex will not cache the IP address anymore and will resolve the name again at next connection attempt. Previously, NewsPlex would cache the IP address indefinitely, which causes bad behavior in at least two circumstances: first if the IP address changed dynamically, and second, if an incorrect (or obsolete) IP address was provided at the time when the name was resolved.
• Introduced 3 new settings, xrefLogGroupNotActive=, xrefLogHadArticle= and xrefLogAddedArticle=, which allow to reenable the corresponding frequent log traces related to cross-reference management during explorations. These traces are no more issued by default.
• Implemented a parallel connect and prioritized news-server waiting mechanism. When asked about an article, NewsPlex will now connect to several news-servers in parallel rather than to one after another. It will also immediately use a connection which has been released by some other activity in the meantime. Therefore a news-server which is slow to connect to will not delay an article retrieval process because the connection will now progress asynchronously while NewsPlex attempts to use other news-servers. Note that NewsPlex does not try to retrieve the same article from several news-servers at the same time, it just connects to them in parallel.
  Categorization is respected in that NewsPlex will wait for a user-configurable number of seconds before requesting a higher category news-server. This time can be adjusted thru the new connect.maxCategoryWait= setting, located in the new [connect] section of the etc\newsplex.ini file.
  There is a new category of tasks, connect tasks, which are used to perform news-server connections. They are visible in the task list. Their number can be controlled by the new connect.maxConnectTasks= setting. New directory connect is where the news-server connection logs are stored by the tasks. This directory can be automatically deleted on exit using the new shutdown.deleteConnect= setting.
  Waiting for a news-server is prioritized, in that some requesters are considered more important than others. It is possible to ajust the relative priorities of direct retrievals, async retrievals and explorations by the means of connect.priorityDirect=, connect.priorityAsync=, and connect.priorityExplore= setttings. By default direct retrievals are the most important and explorations the least. The absolute priority of a news-server request is the sum of the request time and of the priority, which prevents starvation of less important requests as long as the values of relative priorities are not too different from each other.
• The list of news-server connections displayed by the Connected Servers web page and by the NPCONNECTED telnet command now contains a more detailed and (for the Web page) more explicit status for each connection, like Connecting, Direct retrieval or Kept-alive. No TCP connects column is displayed anymore, because it does not have sense with the async connect mechanism. The Bytes Sent and Bytes Received values are accurate; previously these values were reset when a connection was re-used for exploring.
• For explorations, we now log a TCP reconnect count rather than a TCP connect one and the count of the exchanged bytes remains correct even if we switch to a new TCP connection in the middle of the exploration.
• The blindLogin= setting was not operating properly when used for servers which are explored in addition to being used for article retrievals.
• Introduced the explore.numbersCollapseMaxRanges= setting, the server.explore.numbersCollapseMaxRanges= setting, the explore.numbersCollapseMinDistance= setting and the server.numbersCollapseMinDistance= setting, which allow to control how NewsPlex should try to reduce the number of requests issued to news-servers in presence of fragmented article sets.
• Timeout notices sent by news-servers before they close the connection are recognized in more places and cause a reconnect and retry rather than an error.
• If a news-servers is only willing to provide the news-group list thru the XGTITLE request and refuses subsequent information about article ranges for each news-group, then we keep the list, incomplete, rather than erroring. This prevents from downloading the complete list again at next explore.
• Maximum-length IP addresses (eg. 123.123.123.123) could be displayed or logged without the last digit on some Unix versions. This also impacted the ability to connect using HTTPS proxies in rare situations when NewsPlex solved the hostname by itself.
• Introduced the general.timeStampLogs= setting, enabled by default, which makes NewsPlex precede every log line with a time-stamp.
• Unix versions of NewsPlex were not using the thread-safe version of the routine which converts seconds into day and time, and hence could generate wrong time-stamps sometimes.
• Added rudimentary ignoring of telnet escape sequences which some telnet clients send just after connecting.

Version 4.2 (7 March 2004)

In NpUud

• The error consisting in having the last line of an uuencoded file to be too long, the spurious chars being the end of the previous line, is now specifically detected, and does not enter the more general line too long category anymore. The new -P command-line option allows to ignore this error situation.
• Added X-Trace-PostClient-IP: to the set of recognized header lines. This modification also applies to NpPost.

In NewsPlex

• Fixed the bug which caused the Assertion failed: code != AG_RUNNING || ag->code != AG_RUNNING, file newsplex.c, line digits panic. It has been introduced in version 3.2, when zombie retrievals have been moved to a separate task.
• It is no more possible to set a disabled news-server as the posting one using the telnet interface.
• The server.retrieveArticles= setting was ineffective if an article contained references to the news-server. The server.disabled= setting was not taken into account in this case either.
• If asynchronous article retrieval was enabled for all articles, trying to retrieve an inexisting article by Message-ID while a current news-group has been set would panic NewsPlex. The panic file content would be Assertion failed: article != NULL, file newsplex.c, line 19317.
• Introduced the access.bannerOkForVersion= setting and the access.bannerOkAlways= setting in order to prevent NewsPlex from displaying the same old banner, which might not even have been customized, if a new executable is used with an old installation. The bannerOkForVersion= setting defines the NewsPlex version for which the banner= setting is ok. If you want to keep the banner= setting after upgrading NewsPlex, you will need to adjust this setting, unless the boolean bannerOkAlways= setting is set.
• Too many disconnects occurring when getting article descriptions from a news-group do not stop the overall exploration process anymore; NewsPlex will skip to the next news-group. This alleviates the need of using the server.ignoreGroup= setting.
• If a news-server gives a rejection message at a connection attempt, and no other connections are open to it yet, NewsPlex will now assume it is overloaded in situations where previously it would consider that the maximum allowed number of connections from a single IP address has been reached. This gives quicker retries.
• The -d command-line option was not taken into account when a cleanup (-c) or a destroy (-C) command was passed; NewsPlex was always cleaning the current directory.
• Added a new command, NPTRIMPOPULAR <days> [evenRetrieved] which allows to remove unwanted news-group entries from the etc\popular.ini file.
• Introduced the notion of invalid news-group names, in addition to unwanted ones. NewsPlex no longer accepts async as a news-group name on news-servers, since this conflicts with the internal async news-group name and caused malfunction. It also disallows news-group names which would make invalid filenames on one or more of the supported operating systems (namely, containing the : \ / " < > | * or ? characters), plus names which contain , or ; characters. The : and , are impossible in nature because they are used for separating news-group names from one another or from article numbers in article headers and article descriptions. The other characters would not allow the creation of news-group database files, or they appear as resulting from user typos in articles posted to news-servers which accept and create any news-group name. About 225 news-groups became invalid this way in a "full", over 180,000 entries news-group list. The etc\popular.ini file is now automatically cleaned of entries corresponding to invalid news-groups; it does keep entries for unwanted news-groups.
• news-server references to disabled news-servers were not removed from the article database during NPCHECKGROUPS.
• If NewsPlex was shutdown during article database compaction at startup time, the exit code and error message were incorrectly 51 and Could not repair the article database rather than Shutdown requested by ....
• Added a "waiters" column to NPDATASETS and to the corresponding array in the Web page. Fixed column alignment in the "(history)" line. Added a "Contentions: number" line in NPCLIENTS display and after the corresponding array in the Web page; this value just measures internal parallelism and has no importance to users.
• Fixed the problem of etc\groups not being reconstructed properly on Unix-type systems if it ever vanishes; because of a missing buffer flush accross a fork system call, the file could contain the list of active news-groups, or part of it, twice. This file will now be automatically deleted and reconstructed if found corrupted.
• The clients.junkPostedHeader= setting was not processed properly. Only the first 3 characters were used for name matching, so eg. X-No-Archive: got eliminated too if junking of X-Newsreader: was requested.

Version 4.1 (15 January 2004)

In NewsPlex

• Ambiguous characters in URLs, typically a @ escaped as %40 in the login name, were rewritten in etc\servers.ini without proper escaping, so NewsPlex could not reread the file later and generated errors like
  Ignoring entry url of type url because Invalid format: url=user@emailhost:pass@newshost:port
  Server id does not have an URL.
  NewsPlex is terminating with code 20: Error in the etc\servers.ini file.
• Fixed problems related to the async retrieval of articles not belonging to any news-group. Note that they run indefinitely, and must be cancelled manually.
• Disabled news-servers now have a server-number, and their server-disk-names must be unique as well. This allows to still reference them if dynamic enabling and disabling is implemented one day and also prevents from having the same news-server mistakenly present several times in the etc\servers.ini file.
• Introduced the clients.provideXrefs= setting in etc\newsplex.ini, which should allow using NewsPlex with news-readers which require that article descriptions provided by the XOVER command include the Xref: field.
• Introduced the boolean explore.useXrefs= setting in etc\newsplex.ini, whose default value is 1 or true, to complement the per-news-server server.useXrefs= settings. In some setups, involving probably very large news-groups, managing cross-references received from news-servers caused excessive memory usage and system trashing. This new setting allows to disable it globally, rather than having to disable it individually for each news-server.
• Added a Support web link on the web interface.
• NewsPlex could panic and terminate with an Assertion failed: code != AG_RUNNING || ag->code != AG_RUNNING, file newsplex.c, line digits message in the panic file. This meant that a duplicate parallel retrieval was internally attempted for an article scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval. Such a situation will now cause an internal restart, which might recover it. Debug information is logged to the journal file.
• Added the general.mutexUnlockBeforeCondSignal= setting, which allows to deal with certain buggy Linux pthread libraries. If NewsPlex hangs on Ctrl-C instead of shutting down, then try this setting.

Version 4.0 (6 January 2004)

In NpCRCs

• Added a new -c command-line option, which makes NpCRCs compute the CRCs of all files (or just those matching the specified patterns) in current directory or optionally subdirectories as well.
• Introduced 2 new command-line options. -f fileName or Display lines from fileName containing matching CRCs makes NpCRCs look into the fileName file each time it has computed the CRC for a file, in order to find lines which might contain this CRC as a string. Such lines will be displayed. This allows to decide if a file found on disk matches a list of files already known. The companion -m command-line option (Only display file information if match against fileName) prevents NpCRCs from displaying anything for files whose CRC has not been found in fileName. CRCs can be stored in lower or upper case in fileName, but they must have 1 or more leading zeroes if otherwise they would have less than 8 hexadecimal digits.

In NpJPEG

• Added a new command-line option, -n or recover from spurious trailing NUL chars automatically.
  One particular possible usage is to automate the removal of ending junk from files which have been recovered by CHKDSK from corrupted FAT/FAT32 partitions, for example after a brutal machine reset. The size of files recovered from "lost cluster chains" is always multiple of the disk cluster size, since the exact value is only stored in the (presumably lost) directory. NpJPEG can bring such files back to original conditions, by removing the data which were originally in the so-called slack area of files (unused space in last cluster) and did not belong to files from the logical point of view.

In NpMerge

• NpMerge has a new change part number width command-line option, -w width, which allows to merge parts which are numbered differently than .001, .002, ..., .010, etc. By specifying width 0, NpMerge will look for .1, .2, ..., .10, etc. files; if the width is set to 4, it will merge .0001, .0002, ..., .0010, etc. files. The default width is 3.

In NpHdrSep

• NpHdrSep can now handle binary files, that is, files containing binary zeros. Normally, news/mails are not supposed to contain them, but modern news software is able to pass them if somebody mistakenly sends a binary "attachment" directly, without using any encoding. Since the previous version, NewsPlex also passes zeros intact. The main problem today with sending binaries directly is that of line lengths and line endings.
• NpHdrSep now checks for disk overflows when separating posts.

In NpRename

• Added the -l command, for removing leading non-alphanumeric and non-dot characters from file names.

In NpUud

• Specifying / as target directory thru the -t command-line option did not work on Windows.
• The -Dy and -Dy command-line options were not documented in online help.
• Added the -T command-line option, or put the files into a subdirectory named after the Date: line. If this option is specified, the decoded files and the headers will go to a subdirectory named after the Date: line inside the file. The name of this directory is Year-Month-Day. If the -t command-line option is specified too, the date subdirectory is created inside the requested target directory rather than inside the current directory.
• If a line in an uuencoded file, for example the last line, had additional trailing characters, which did not result from some recognizable type of corruption leading to excessive characters in a line, then the error message confused the actual length of the line and the expected one and proposed to pass the -p command-line option (pad too short lines) in order to ignore the problem. This did not help however. Now in this situation, the new -x command-line option is proposed (ignore extra characters in too long lines) and it actually works.
• If one of the source files had the same name as the computed cleaned .hdr file, then both files would be mistakenly deleted after extracting the encoded content.
• More advertisement lines are recognized at the end of parts in multipart postings being decoded.
• The -a or allow truncation command-line option is now accepted for yDecoding as well. NpUud will log the truncation to the generated .hdr file.
• Added the -b command-line option which allows to ignore the error situation where file sizes declared in =ybegin and =yend lines do not match but the file matches the size declared in the =ybegin line. Such an error can eg. happen if several files are yEncoded at once, and the second size is mistakenly the sum of the sizes of all preceding files.
• Added the -N or Interactive ignoring command-line option, which, if specified together with the -j command-line option, makes NpUud display offending lines and ask whether to ignore them (this time or always). This allows to easily deal with uuencoded files where comments are intermixed with the encoded context.
• Fixed the processing of corrupted yEncoded files. If a part contained errors, NpUud could mistakenly delete the .tmp file which contained previously decoded parts. If a decoding error occurred at the first part, a pretty useless .dec file would be left over. Made certain error messages more explicit.
• NpUud now automatically detects a corruption consisting in inserting one or more DEFANGED_ strings into encoded content. It will issue a specific error, and if the user passes the new -F command-line option, it will automatically fix the problem.

In NewsPlex

• Using the Group Availability commands could crash NewsPlex if there were news-servers with server-numbers higher than 127.
• In minimal mode, NewsPlex would crash if a news-group activation was attempted.
• More junk header lines are eliminated from the headers of posted articles.
  Update: this has become the clients.junkPostedHeader= setting before the release.
• Added the -G command-line option, ignore another server running on the NNTP port. It allows to start NewsPlex when some funny proxies or firewalls are already running on the computer.
  Update: this command-line option has been converted into the startup.ignoreAnother= setting inside the new etc\newsplex.ini file (cf. below) before the release.
• NewsPlex did not properly reconstruct a missing index file for a news-group from the dataset2 file at startup time if article renumbering has been performed for that news-group previously. The index file would contain duplicate entries, the news-reader would receive a 412 No news group has been selected message when trying to access the group, and a Tree node is duplicate error message would be visible in log files.
• Systematized the format of certain error messages, to be "<string>: <errorMsg>.<newline>" rather than "<string>, <errorMsg>.<newline>" or "<string> (<errorMsg>).<newline>", and to have an ending dot. A few messages have been grouped on a single line.
• Re-arranged the output of the news-server deletion commands for better readability: fixed-width columns like article counts are now displayed first and aligned.
• Added a new per-news-server flag, l(group-name1 group-name2 ...) or use the LISTGROUP request instead of GROUP to select the specified news-groups on the news-server.
  This option sometimes allows to access specific news-groups on news-servers which normally forbid entering them thru the standard GROUP request, although they do have them.
  Update: this flag has become the server.listgroupGroup= setting before the release.
• Enlarged the maximum legal article size from 5 to 6 megabytes.
• Commands NPCANCEL, NPDEACTIVATE, NPFORCETASK, NPREFRESH are now documented by the HELP command in the telnet interface.
• The handling of blind login (n flag) news-servers has been improved. NewsPlex will now ignore a late positive welcome message and will also reconnect and retry an article request command if it gets a late negative welcome message.
  Update: this is now the blindLogin= setting.
• NewsPlex would sometimes log an incorrect message, Range 60575-60574 will be explored again, when getting article descriptions and the news-server delivered data outside of the requested range.
• Introduced the etc\newsplex.ini file and eliminated most of command-line options. Also eliminated the config\authinfo, config\banner, config\groups.yes and config\groups.no files, which have become settings inside the etc\newsplex.ini file.
• Introduced the webHtm=, webUrl=, telnetHtm=, telnetUrl=, newsHtm= and newsUrl= settings in the [access] section of the etc\newsplex.ini file. They allow to disable the creation of the corresponding bookmark files.
• When a news-server is deleted, traces are no more produced for news-groups not having articles from that news-server.
• After a new news-server has been added to the list, when exploring it for the first time, for certain news-groups NewsPlex could log a confusing Got X server refs, Y new, Z reget trace to the explore\server-disk-name file. The reget word suggested that the article database already contained news-server references to the new news-server. In fact, NewsPlex was counting as regets incoming article descriptions already marked as deleted in the article database but not yet physically removed. Now such incoming article descriptions are accounted as already deleted.
• When counting the various small fixes performed on article descriptions obtained from news-servers, NewsPlex was considering even those performed in lines which have been ultimately rejected because of a bigger error encountered later in processing. This gave the false impression that a lot of fixes have been performed in what has been finally added to the article database (assuming the entry was new).
• Introduced many shutdown.delete...= settings, which allow to specify that NewsPlex should automatically delete certain specific files and directories, otherwise left as-is on exit.
• Replaced the config\filters file with the more flexible etc\filters.ini file. Additional filtering criteria have been added too. It is also now possible to hide an article rather than deleting it from the article database. This avoids having it appear again later thru other news-servers. The new etc\hidden file logs hidden Message-IDs.
• Replaced the config\servers file with the more flexible etc\servers.ini file. Server flags have been replaced with news-server settings. Several new settings have been introduced. The new -i file command-line option allows to import a raw news-server list into the etc\servers.ini file at startup.
• The config directory is no more used or created, since there are no more read-only configuration files in NewsPlex.
• NewsPlex now stops after the auto-configuration, to allow you to modify the default settings before starting normal operations.
• It is now possible to have several posting news-servers. The selection is done dynamically according to news-groups being posted to, using the new server.postingGroup= settings in etc\servers.ini.
• It is now possible to have disabled news-servers. They do not have server-number anymore, and appear in the list with a Disab status and in grey on the Web interface. This replaces commenting news-servers out in the old config\servers file.
• Old style news-server flags are still displayed in the server list (web page and NPSERVERS command), because they are compact. The display is even more compact now, as flags which previously could be repeated are now displayed just once, with a count behind.
• NPDEACTIVATE forgot to provide a status response line on success.
• If the news-server gave an unexpected error in response to the XHDR MESSAGE-ID command (or to the XPAT MESSAGE-ID replacement), NewsPlex would stop exploring it. Now, NewsPlex just ignores the condition and gets full article descriptions using XOVER. This allows to use news-servers which artificially restrict certain commands. This restriction policy does not seem very smart, given that news-readers, and NewsPlex in particular, use the XHDR MESSAGE-ID command in order to avoid having to use XOVER on every news-server.
• If a news-server exploration is requested manually, NewsPlex will now try to force the main exploration task for the news-server to run immediately again, rather than creating a new task. This has the advantage that in case of a failure, the next exploration will start at the time indicated by the error message, rather than at the time when the main exploration task was scheduled to run again originally.
• The auto-configuration process has been improved to find more news-servers at the ISP and on the local network. More detailed and timely progress information is provided. It also takes less time to interrupt this operation if desired.
• Automatic decoding of files with NpUud would not work if the pathname of NewsPlex's working directory contained blanks, eg. was C:\Program Files\NewsPlex. This is because NewsPlex passes the full pathname of the async\xxxxxxxx.tmp files to NpUud thru the command line, and blanks were interpreted as argument separators. Now if the pathname contains blanks, it is passed double-quoted, which makes it a single argument.
• Implemented article retrieval by Message-ID (the ARTICLE, HEAD, STAT and BODY commands) even if the current news-group was not yet set by the news-reader or if the Message-ID is not present in it. Such articles are considered as a variety of zombies; the same rules apply for deciding which news-servers will be used for downloading. The retrieval can be disabled with the new clients.globalMsgIdRetrieval= setting. It is enabled by default. If the article cannot be obtained, it is simply reported as inexisting.
• Replaced the etc\popular file with the more flexible and uniformized etc\popular.ini file. It is now sorted by news-group name and contains even info about news-groups from which articles have not yet been retrieved.
• Added a -v command-line option which just makes NewsPlex print the banner and terminate, without asking for a final key press.
• Introduced the server.zombies= setting which can be used to disable having zombies from news-servers which are the sole source of their articles.
• The log traces for article retrieval are now clearer. The Server preference order list became a table and indicates whether a given news-server was added because the article is a zombie (? in first column) or because the news-server has the attemptMsgId= setting (+ in first column). Articles with nothing in first column are normally present on news-server. The Added server XXX to server references (attemptMsgId=1) traces are not performed separately anymore.
• Implemented the XPAT and DATE standard commands.
• Cancelling an asynchronous article retrieval while a retrieval is in progress is not taken into account immediately. Previously however, it mistakenly caused the article to remain in the list until the next retrieval attempt. Now, cancelling a running asynchronous article retrieval will be effective as soon as the current retrieval attempt terminates.
• The NPCANCEL and NPFORCETASK commands now accept several arguments. A separate response line will be produced for each argument.
• Introduced cross-post management. NewsPlex now uses the cross-post/cross-reference information (Xref: tags or lines) in retrieved article descriptions in order to add articles to all locally-active news-groups to which the articles have been cross-posted, before the news-groups are explictly explored themselves. This can save some network traffic. Log traces allow to see what non-active news-groups articles have also been cross-posted to.
  The new server.useXrefs= setting, enabled by default, allows to disable the usage of cross-reference information for specific news-servers, which for example do not provide correct news-groups or correct numbers.
• Some news-servers refuse the GROUP request on specific news-groups, but accept LISTGROUP instead. The new server.listgroupIfGroupFails= setting tells NewsPlex to use LISTGROUP to try to enter a news-group if GROUP fails for any reason.
• The popularity web page now also remembers the last time the GROUP request has been used for a given news-group. This allows to decide about the opportunity of deactivating it, as absence of article retrievals might be simply due to the news-group not having had new articles for a long time. The etc\popular.ini file stores this information as group.lastGroupSecs= settings.
• Fixed the database compaction code to not display Warning: No dataset for article xxx messages with fantasy numbers like 0 or -219098 anymore when there were corruptions, typically resulting from previous disk full errors. This bug was caused by the introduction of self-balancing binary trees in version 3.5; the compaction code has not been fully updated.
• The compaction code now also removes such problematic records from the database, and when they happen, also removes the information about the already retrieved article descriptions regarding the corresponding news-group from the newsrc2 files. This allows to recover the database more or less cleanly during the next exploration of news-servers. Recovered articles will appear as new ones.
• Added real-time article filtering. If a news-server has the new filterArticles= setting, filters will be applied to incoming article descriptions and articles will be either immediately rejected or immediately marked as hidden.
• Added the server.retrieveArticles= setting, which can be used to prevent NewsPlex from retrieving articles from specific news-servers.
• Moved the messages about the scheduling of explores from the journal file to the per-news-server log files in the explore directory, in order to unclutter the file and to avoid having it growing indefinitely.
• Articles whose Subject: lines start with Re: or contain (0/1) are no more considered as containing binaries by default. This behavior can be adjusted using the async.binaryFilter= settings.
• More information is collected and logged about the exploration history. The Web page and the NPSERVERS command now display the time since the last successful explore rather than from the previous tentative.
• Messages about scanning intervals of article numbers now indicate how many ranges remain to be processed.
• The news-groups on newly added news-servers are now explored in the popularity order.
• If there was no ,list entry in the newsrc2 file for the currently explored news-server, notably when the file itself did not (yet) exist, the message saying why a full news-group list was being requested from the news-server incorrectly said etc/newsplex.ini updated. Now it says no ,list entry in newsrc2 file.
• Introduced the explore.quitAfter= setting which makes NewsPlex close news-server connections immediately after finishing explorations. You can specify this option when NewsPlex is only occasionally accessed by news-readers, in order to decrease news-server usage.
• Added *.m2v* to default binary patterns.
• New hideIfBackground= setting, only used and useful on Windows, changes the way in which NewsPlex switches to background mode. It makes NewsPlex hide its own console window instead of destroying it. This allows NewsPlex to still get system signals, notably about system shutdowns, and to terminate gracefully.

Version 3.9 (11 January 2003)

In NpPost

• The default posting news-server is now simply news.

In NewsPlex

• The telnet link on the Web interface now contains the IP address of the computer on which NewsPlex runs, rather than the localhost name, so that it is possible to use it even when NewsPlex runs on another machine. Multi-homing is taken into account: NewsPlex gives the IP address of the network interface thru which the Web browser actually connected in.
• NewsPlex will no more mistakenly open more connections to a given news-server than allowed by the configuration setting. Connection counting has also been fixed, so the Too many connections to server attempted error will not appear for some news-servers without reason after some time of operation. NewsPlex was also mistakenly using the above error message for 2 different error conditions, purely internal and server-induced limitations, so it was not very obvious to see where the error came from (hint: if the explore\server-disk-name file was not modified, the error was purely internal). Now, trying to go over the internal limitation (set with the R and r flags) is indicated thru the new More connections to server attempted than configured error message.
• If an article was corrupted and lines contained binary zeros, then the client was only sent the portions of lines till the zero. This had the bad effect that if such a corruption occurred on the last line, the client would not get the carriage-return + newline character combination preceding the final single-dot line, and hence think the article did not yet end. It would therefore hang, waiting for more data to come. Now, it will get the junk in its entirety (depending on how it analyzes the data, it might still not be able to notice the end of data).
• Introduced 64-bit integers for counting the total number of bytes scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval and also the total number of bytes transferred with news-servers. This avoids overflows, which show up as negative numbers, if you schedule very large batches of asynchronous article retrievals.
• In the Web pages, the + characters in news-group names were not escaped in URLs, so it was eg. impossible to display the Stats or the Articles for comp.lang.c++ on the Active Groups page.
• Added code which pretends that NewsPlex supports the so-called "Secure Password Authentication" (a proprietary protocol used by MSN news-servers). Some future version might be able to use such servers as a client.
• The Group Popularity web page now also shows active news-groups from which articles have never been retrieved. The memory usage of the feature has been reduced. The color scheme is different:

  Line color	Meaning
  Green	active news-groups from which some articles have already been retrieved
  Blue	active news-groups from which articles have never been retrieved (and hence are candidates for deactivation)
  Grey	no more active news-groups from which some articles have been retrieved in the past

Version 3.8 (19 December 2002)

In NpPost

• NpPost is a new utility for posting Usenet articles. It can be used to post text or binary files, or to repost existing articles. It will transform either the indicated file or its standard input into something which is acceptable as a news.

In NpCRCs

• NpCRCs is a new utility. It checks the CRCs of files according to lists stored in text files, typically having extensions .crc, .csv or .sfv. The tool is able to process virtually any format CRC list, as long as the name and the CRC are stored on the same line for every entry.

In NpMove

• NpMove is a new utility. It moves files to predefined directories based on name patterns. These files have presumably been decoded from news articles using NpUud. It also moves the associated .hdr files, if any, deletes duplicates and otherwise makes names unique in the destination directories.

In NpShow00

• NpShow00 is a new utility. It can show the content of .000 files accompanying certain multipart postings on Usenet, and proving the attributes of transmitted files, either intrinsic (eg. the file size or its CRC), for verification, or attributes related to the way the file has been posted (eg. the part size used and the resulting number of parts).

In NpMerge

• NpMerge is a new utility. It can be used to merge a collection of file.XXX files, where XXX are numbers, presumably fixed-size parts of a large file, into the original large file. It is the opposite of NpSplit.

In NpPop3

• NpPop3 is a new utility. It can be used to retrieve the email messages from one or more POP3 servers into local mailbox files, or just to display them.

In NpJPEG

• NpJPEG is a new utility. It can be used for checking whether JPEG files are correct, and can also fix certain corruptions and clean the files from trash.

In NpSplit

• NpSplit is a new utility. It splits files into fixed-size file.XXX parts where XXX are part numbers. It is the opposite of NpMerge.

In NpHdrSep

• NpHdrSep is a new utility. It deals with collections of Usenet news articles, where individual articles are separated by either ======== or From ... lines. It allows to separate them into individual Usenet news articles. The Usenet news articles can be for example the .hdr files which result from separating a news article from its binary attachments.

In NpHdrCat

• NpHdrCat is a new utility. It merges all .hdr news articles in current directory into a single directoryName.hdr collection of Usenet articles, named after the directory.

In NpPlay

• NpPlay is a new utility. This is a spartiate multimedia file player, but able to do some particular stuff like resetting your MIDI synthesizer to default conditions before playing the next file, so that the file sounds correctly, or skipping the current file if you press 5 on the numeric keypad.

In NpPrtCmp

• NpPrtCmp is a new utility. It is able to check whether a file named file.XXX, where XXX are digits, is really part XXX of another file, assuming it has been split into equal size parts.

In NpRename

• NpRename is a new utility. It can examine a series of news or mail files and optionally rename them according to their Message-ID: or to their Subject:. It can also optionally set the timestamp of these files to the value of their Date: line.

In NpNNTP

• This is the new name for the previous GetNNTP tool.
• The environment variable is now NPNNTP.
• Options and commands now start with - rather than with /, for consistency with other tools.
• Slightly re-arranged the built-in help.
• The group set with the -g option was not taken into account for the -b arbitrary-string command.
• The command could crash if a login was passed without a password in the URL.

In NpUud

• For yEncoded files, NpUud forgot to set the date of decoded content according to the Date: line of enclosing news/mails.
• Added the -g position command-line option, which allows to decode uuencoded fragments of a file. You need to indicate, thru the position argument, which XXX integer in the Subject: line of the file should be used as part number (usually the first one). NpUud will decode the partial content and put it into a file named part.XXX. If the content does not have a final end line, you will also need to pass the -a (allow truncation) option.
• New -Du command-line option disables the recognition of uuencoded content in processed files.
• New -Dy command-line option disables the recognition of yEncoded content in processed files.
• New -S command-line option disables size and CRC checking for yEncoded content.
• Now .par and .pXX extensions, where X is a digit, are retained when computing the name of the .hdr file.
• More news/mail header lines are automatically recognized and skipped.
• New -I command-line option makes NpUud continue decoding other files (if any) if the current file could not be decoded. By default, NpUud will now stop processing further files on error. Previously, NpUud would not stop on certain "benign" errors.
• If a complete decoded file already exists, NpUud will now refuse to start a new yDec parts assembly process. Previously this was possible, but when the last part has been processed, NpUud would complain that it could not rename the temporary .tmp file into the complete decoded filename.
• If a single error occurred when yDecoding several files, NpUud would consider that every decode process following the failing one has failed, and not remove the yEncoded content from the mail/news file.

In GetNNTP

• The tool has been renamed into NpNNTP.

In NewsPlex

• Fixed a failed assertion occurring when exploring a news-server which returns extra article descriptions when asked for just one.
• If a disk write error occurred when appending new data to index and update files, these files could get destroyed.
• Whether news-servers provide articles with a correct Message-ID is now checked during all article retrievals, even those by number, because some news-servers provide wrong articles even in normal circumstances. The Message-ID is now also checked in the status reply line, which precedes the article itself. This allows to switch to another news-server without disconnecting the news-reader.
  Note that this prevents chaining two or more NewsPlex programs if article renumbering is enabled at level 2 in the upstream one, because the Message-ID in the article body is still the original one, and not the one which has been altered by NewsPlex to make an article appear as new. Enabling renumbering does not however make sense except in the closest/downstream NewsPlex, the one used by the news-reader directly.
• NewsPlex would stop exploring a news-server for a few minutes, but not close the connection if it received a 420 No article(s) selected response to an XOVER 0-number request. Now it will just consider that the 0..number range is empty.
• Additional article description truncations are now accepted when exploring news-servers.
• When listing Message-IDs, NewsPlex now reconnects in case of a timeout notice from the news-server.
• Specifying 0 as the argument of the -a command-line option now disables the retrieval of articles scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval. Previously, passing 0 was equivalent to passing the default value (4) and it was not possible to disable the asynchronous article retrieval of already scheduled articles.
• Improved dealing with news-servers which send binary junk when asked for article descriptions. NewsPlex now better tries to detect the end of such output, so as to avoid getting lost and reconnecting. The log file for explorations can now contain binary zeros, if such were present in bad responses from the news-server.
• Added a new command-line option, -y days and a new per-news-server flag, ydays, which can be used to limit the age of article descriptions added to the article database during news-server explorations. By default, the age is not limited.
• Introduced dynamic deactivation of news-groups, thru the new NPDEACTIVATE command and thru the web interface.
  Note: Because, for now, the newsrc2 files are cleaned off non-active news-groups at next exploration only, it is better to shutdown NewsPlex before re-activating a news-group, or the news-group will not be re-populated with news-server references correctly.
• Fixed rare corruptions occurring when saving index files, where some entries were saved several times. This happened when activating large groups from the Web interface.
• Some news-groups could not be handled from the Web interface because NewsPlex did not process the escape sequences for ambiguous characters in names sent by Web browsers.
• The NPDELETEOLD was not skipping articles already internally marked as deleted, so it could issue inappropriate but harmless messages sometimes. It now also collects and prints statistics, and logs messages when ignoring an error.
• A news-server is now always identified using the text server-disk-name (server-number) in all messages, except those which put these two components into separate columns. Previously, depending on the message, NewsPlex sometimes only showed the server-disk-name or the server-number.
• Added a workaround allowing to use buggy HTTPS proxy servers, which use only newline characters, without preceding carriage return characters, to separate lines in their connection response. Previously, using such servers would lead to infinite waits and hence connection timeouts.
• Added a new per-news-server option, g(group-name1 group-name2 ...), which allows to specify a list of news-groups which should not be explored on the news-server.
• More news-server connection responses are recognized as a hint to try another proxy from the same group to reach them.
• Fewer internal data structures, but still some, are locked against concurrent access when NewsPlex sends replies to the news-reader (which can take some time, depending on the speed of the network connection and on the willingness of the news-reader to read incoming data).
• Article numbers greater than 214,748,364 are now correctly handled. Previously, NewsPlex would perform endless "tenfold leap" recoveries when retrieving full article descriptions.
• Article numbering gaps during the retrieval of news-server references are much better dealt with. Previously, a tenfold gap would make NewsPlex ignore all the subsequent references till the end of interval, yet print an error trace for each one. Also added printing of dots during this retrieval.
• Introduced the config\banner file, which can define a replacement welcome message for NewsPlex.
• Introduced a new way of dealing with unreachable news-servers. Rather than returning a specific error message or pretending that the article has been deleted (and renumbering it under a new reference), NewsPlex now allows to specify that the connection to the news-reader be simply closed, as the result of a "timeout".
• Added the -F command-line option which makes NewsPlex not show the activation announcement articles when a news-group is activated; the news-group appears totally empty initially.
• More binary file patterns are recognized in Subject: header lines.
• NewsPlex would quickly terminate with the Error during synchronization with main server exit status the first time it was run if a news-server was marked as "main".
• If the U flag (do not explore) was indicated for a news-server, it was also not possible to explore this news-server manually.
• Traces are now issued to log files when a login failure is ignored (as requested by the i flag).
• If an HTTPS proxy replies 404 Not Found to a connection request by host name, NewsPlex (and other network utilities) will retry using the IP address.
• If the config\groups.yes file contained real news-group names, without wild-cards, and if the news-server refused to change the current news-group to one of these news-groups and returned a 480 permission denied error message, NewsPlex would stop the exploration very early. Now it will just continue with the other news-groups and/or patterns. BTW, a workaround was to set the L flag for that news-server.
• The new n per-news-server flag (blind login) asks NewsPlex not to wait for the news-server welcome message before issuing commands. This flag is useful with certain news-servers only, those which issue the welcome message with a delay, and in the meantime accept other commands.
• It is now possible to cancel an asynchronous article retrieval from either the telnet interface, using the new NPCANCEL command, or from the Web interface.
• Changed the "Async retrieval" Web page to display the table of downloads even when it is empty.
• If the news-server sends a 502 error code to refuse the XHDR MESSAGE-ID command, NewsPlex will no more stop exploring the news-server. It will first try the equivalent XPAT MESSAGE-ID command, and if this fails as well, it will fail-over to using a plain XOVER for getting new article information.
• When exploring news-servers, NewsPlex now avoids getting the full list of news-groups matching the config\groups.yes file each time, and instead asks just for the news-groups which appeared since the previous exploration (minus 24 hours, to account for time zone differences). This allows to decrease the amount of data transferred with the news-servers during the exploration very considerably, sometimes over 20 times. The full list of matching news-groups is requested every 24 hours, to allow deleting news-groups which do not exist on the news-servers anymore. An appropriate time-stamp is now stored inside newsrc2 files. In order to force the retrieval of a full news-group list from news-servers, one can update the config\groups.yes file.
• When a news-group is activated, NewsPlex does not store it in the newsrc2 file anymore if it does not actually exist on the news-server. This avoids getting spurious news-group vanished from news-server messages at next exploration.
• Implemented an empty LIST NEWSGROUPS command to avoid getting warnings with news-readers which issue it.
• If a logs\cli-host-port file was deleted (only possible on Unix), then NewsPlex would endless try to append it to the logs\clients file (before deleting it), preventing other activities from doing the same thing. Now, errors like this one are considered permanent and NewsPlex will simply ignore them. Also, if an error occur when appending temporary log files to a global log file (eg. resource exhaustions), NewsPlex will allow other activities to access the global file while it is retrying.
• Some responses from MS news-servers are non-standard, and made NewsPlex either stop the exploration or loop endlessly on bad GROUP request responses. For this second problem a double security has been implemented: the number of loops is now limited and bad responses are recognized directly.
• Introduced a Group Popularity web page. It shows the usage information otherwise maintained in the etc\popular file, and offers links to read and deactivate groups. Also improved the functionality and looks of other news-group-related pages, notably by converting news-group names into links allowing to read them.
• When an article scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval was being reported as deleted, it was not marked as such in the article database until the actual retrieval has started. Now it is marked immediately, so if your news-reader requests the full article list (eg. because if you unsubscribe and re-subscribe to the news-group), you will immediately see the articles marked with /a in From: column. This allows deleting all previously read or scheduled for download articles.
• When compacting the article database, NewsPlex was deleting the last entry of datasets, while the last entry in the corresponding index must be maintained to correctly number the following articles. This triggered spurious (but harmless) database compactions at each startup for the corresponding news-groups.
• Added buttons to close idle connections on the "Connected servers" Web page. They correspond to the NPCLOSE telnet command.
• The remembering of retrieved articles is now done by default but is more configurable. The -R command-line option now takes a flags argument which specifies the different aspects.
• Introduced the NPFORCETASK handle telnet command and added buttons on the Tasks web page. They allow to force the immediate execution of a specific task, for example an async download.
• Introduced a new category notion for news-servers, defined thru the new tcategory flag. It allows to enforce the order in which news-servers are used for downloading articles. NewsPlex will not use a news-server with a higher category until it has tried to get the article from news-servers of lower categories.
• The activation of a news-group from the Web interface now takes the same 3 second delay as from a news-reader or the telnet interface, in order to allow for the news-group to become populated with some articles before it is offered for access, and to counter possible abuse.
• NewsPlex would panic if an unrecoverable error occurred during the posting of an article. The message in the panic file would be "SOCK_VALID (sock)". Unrecoverable errors are either the client or the news-server closing the connection or a shutdown being requested.
• Fixed the problem of table cell borders sometimes being not drawn in HTML tables when the cell was empty.
• In the Accessed news-groups table and in the NPACCESSED command output, the MOD/Modified column has been removed and the information made available as an M flag in the Flags column.
• The NPDELETEOLD command is now available from the Actions Web page too. The minimal age has been changed from 8 to 4 days.
• The restart is now possible from the Actions web page.
• The NPDELETESERVER command is now available from the Servers web page as a per-news-server Delete button in the new Refs column.
• The NPFILTER command is now available from the Active Groups web page as Filter buttons in the new Spam column.
• The NPGLOBALSTATS command is now available from the Web interface as a Group availability page.
• The list of articles in the Web interface is now massaged to avoid too wide columns, thru intelligent insertion of blanks in cells, which allow web browsers to wrap lines. This concerns the From, Subject and Message-ID columns.
• Removed the link to a Post web page till the functionality gets implemented.
• Added a Post column to the Servers web page table, which allows to define the posting/main news-server. The No posting button in the title bar of the table allows to disable posting. The NPPOSTSERVER telnet command, when passed 0 will disable posting now, rather than just display the current posting news-server (this is still possible by not passing any argument at all).
• The NPREWRITEGROUP command is now available from the Active Groups web page as Rewrite buttons in the new Rewrite column.
• With the above change, all telnet commands are now available thru the Web interface as well (apart for the exotic NPMARKRETRIEVED).

Version 3.7 (27 March 2002)

In GetNNTP

• GetNNTP accepts two new command-line options: /c or console mode, which makes it not create any files (this is practical for issuing commands to NewsPlex), and /w or wait for a key press at end, which is practical for displaying some results from NewsPlex in a temporary window.
• The files generated by GetNNTP now include the url of the proxy in their names. This allows to run in parallel several GetNNTP commands issuing a request to the same news-server, but using different proxies. The first line of the log file now includes the name of the file.
• GetNNTP now checks that the proxy has been specified with a valid type.
• GetNNTP now accepts a new command-line option /m list-file-name column-number which allows to request several articles by Message-ID from a list located in a file. This file can be for example etc\done or etc\scheduld (column-number should be 5 then), or a list of Message-ID lines extracted from news articles (column-number should be 2).
• GetNNTP now accepts incomplete proxy URLs and logs the time necessary to obtain the connection.
• The tunnel proxy type introduced in NewsPlex (see below) is also supported in GetNNTP, although it does not make much sense to use it.
• Added the /i article-file-name option, which makes GetNNTP read the news-group and Message-ID information from the indicated file (only the header of the 1st article is read), and request the article using this information. You can use this option to request a new copy of asynchronously retrieved articles if you notice the current copy is for example corrupted.
• If the GETNNTP environment variable is set, it will be used as the default news-server name.

In NpUud

• NpUud recognizes more mail and news header types.
• NpUud now also preserves .[r-z]<digits> extensions of files when computing the names of .hdr files.
• NpUud now recognizes mail header extension lines, and does not choke on them anymore (if -j is set).
• NpUud now accepts file lists in place of ordinary files to decode, if the new -@ option is passed on the command-line. Such file names must be prefixed with the @ character, eg. npuud -j -f -@ @listfile. This allows to uudecode files from hundreds of successive parts, whose names would not fit on the command line. The deferred file deletion table has been enlarged, so that larger multiparts can fit.
• It is now possible to tell NpUud to recognize additional mail/news header lines when uudecoding files. The -m string command-line option allows to add a string, which if found at the beginning of a line, will make NpUud consider this line as a mail/news header, and hence skip it if skipping was enabled with -j.
• NpUud, when switching to the next file in order to continue decoding a file, would sometimes jump to the file after it instead.
• Added the -r option to NpUud, which makes it ignore errors consisting of repeated line endings. Typically the last line might sometimes have extra 4 chars at the end, these extra chars being the same as the preceding 4 chars.
• More advertisement lines are recognized at the end of parts in multipart postings being decoded.
• Added the -e command-line option, which allows to continue parsing the uuencoded file in spite of encoding errors, to print all such errors and to measure how much the file is damaged. The total of errors is printed at the end. Note that this command-line option does not make NpUud accept or automatically fix the encountered errors. For that to happen, appropriate command-line options must be set individually. If some non-ignored error happens, NpUud will not keep the decoded file and leave the source file unmodified.
• Added support for yEncoded content. Just like in the uudecoding case, encoded files are separated into content and .hdr files containing the envelope. For multiparts, the unique .hdr file contains the envelopes of all the parts. Multipart decoding is disabled by default (the -u option enables them), and fake CRCs of 1 can be accepted with -C.
  It is possible to create separate .XXX files for parts of a yEncoded multipart posting, rather than merging them into the complete file, by passing the -U command-line option.

In NewsPlex

• The dialog with proxies is now logged to log files.
• It is now possible to specify a proxy without a type. NewsPlex will assume the most common type corresponding to the port value. If neither a type nor a port is provided, NewsPlex will assume type https on port 80.
• Using the new o option, it is possible to specify per-news-server proxies, which do not need to be numbered. So instead of for example writing:

  	proxy https://proxyhost:80,2
  	proxy socks5://proxyhost2,2
  	5 newshost,2 

  one can simply write:

  	5 newshost o(https://proxyhost:80 socks5://proxyhost2) 

  or even, given the new default typing:

  	5 newshost o(proxyhost socks5://proxyhost2) 

• If a news-server gives a plain 502 error (which means that you, or the initial proxy used, are not in its service area), NewsPlex now tries another proxy, if any.
• The X flag (extra time on connect) can now be repeated.
• If a proxy has been specified with the wrong type, NewsPlex will now switch to the next one from the same group.
• If a news-server gives an empty group list, NewsPlex quits the connection immediately rather than after a delay. It also tries to guess whether an empty group list is not the result of forgotten authentication. Finally, it distinguishes between the disappearance of all news-groups and the disappearance of just the news-groups matched by config\groups.yes file. In the first case, NewsPlex will still retry later, while in the second case, it will purge the databases of entries corresponding to the now empty news-server and consider the news-server does not have active news-groups for the moment.
• The default maximum number of connections opened to a single news-server is now 4 instead of 8. It can still be freely changed through R and r flags, except the r flag now decreases the maximum by 1 instead of 2, which allows to achieve a granularity of 1 instead of 2. A warning is logged if the resulting value is less than 1.
• Articles without Subject: still caused invalid entries in etc\done and etc\scheduld files. This time the fix should be good.
• More binary file patterns are recognized in Subject: header lines.
• Shutdown request through signal is taken into account much faster during the auto-configuration process.
• The config\filters file now allows a third column, for defining patterns for subjects.
• Database checking was performed too late in the initialization process. If some indices needed to be reconstructed from datasets, the corresponding groups would not be considered as active until NewsPlex was restarted.
• etc\retrievd will now be automatically applied at startup if some indices needed to be reconstructed.
• Certain critical errors occurring during database checking will now make NewsPlex terminate with the new 51 code.
• Via the telnet interface, it is now possible to pass a substring of a server-disk-name to the NPEXPLORESERVER, NPCLOSE, NPDELETESERVER and NPPOSTSERVER commands, in place of a server-number. This substring must contain something else than digits (otherwise it will be considered as a server-number), and must identify the news-server in a unique way: it is not very likely that a com or news string will be good.
• Added a new command-line option -Z count, which allows to change the number of simultaneous zombie retries (default is 1).
• New command-line option -O makes NewsPlex compact all the databases and rewrite all index files at startup.
• Added a new per-news-server flag: i or ignore login failures. If it is set, NewsPlex will attempt to use a news-server even if the login sequence failed.
• Introduced a systematic timeout on proxy responses. Previously, if NewsPlex decided not to timeout the TCP connections, it would also not timeout the proxy responses, so if a proxy did not respond yet left the connection open, NewsPlex could wait indefinitely.
• Introduced the -E command-line option, which makes NewsPlex show only active groups to the news-readers.
• Accelerated the retrieval of article descriptions from news-servers and reduced the number of bytes transferred. NewsPlex now retrieves full article descriptions only for articles which it does not yet know. If you have many news-servers for a news-group and there are long threads of discussion inside, the gain can be more than tenfold.
• NewsPlex now serializes connection attempts to each news-server. This allows to switch to another news-server much faster if the current one has a long connection time.
• The way of selecting a news-server for retrieving an article has changed. NewsPlex will now use one of the already open news-server connections before attempting to open new connections to potentially faster news-servers.
• The Internet detection code is more verbose about the reason why it thinks the machine is not connected. It also now considers all 10.0.0.xxx addresses as local.
• If the last line of an XOVER response has an out-of-range article number, and at the same time the dot ending the list appears at the end of this line rather than on the following line, NewsPlex will no more wait for more lines, timeout and retry.
• If the welcome message from a news-server seems corrupted, NewsPlex will log the entire response.
• The config\groups.yes and config\servers files were mistakenly kept open while NewsPlex was running.
• Updated the content of the automatically generated default config\servers file.
• It was not possible to connect to machines whose names started with a digit, yet were not IP addresses.
• Introduced a new type of proxy, the tunnel:// proxy, which allows to directly access a specific news-server by connecting to a machine different from the one where this news-server actually runs.
• If the news-server timed out when asked for the list of news-groups, NewsPlex could sometimes reconnect indefinitely rather than abandoning after a few retries and waiting some time.
• When a zombie article is scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval, its retrieval retries are now started immediately, rather than being postponed by 5 minutes, as in prior versions.
• NewsPlex now also produces telnet.url and web.url files, containing Internet Explorer links to its Telnet and Web interfaces.
• Added checking of Message-IDs in retrieved articles. Sometimes, news-servers provide incorrect articles when asked by Message-ID or even return junk instead of a valid article. Such articles will not be accepted anymore during asynchronous article retrieval, and during direct retrievals will cause the connection to the news-reader to be broken, because there is no other way to inform the news-reader of a problem. The next time the news-reader asks for the same article, another news-server will be used as source preferably.
• It was not possible to have backslashes (\) in login names, because NewsPlex forgot to replace them with underscores when constructing file names.
• In minimal mode, NewsPlex will now systematically limit the number of news-groups from which it attempts to retrieve test articles. Previously, getting only "article deleted" errors would make him test all news-groups.
• If a shutdown is performed in minimal mode before an article could be retrieved successfully, NewsPlex will no more move the explore log to the logs\unusable file.
• The name and port of client connections are now stored inside the client log files themselves. After file content was moved into logs\clients, it was no more possible to see whom a given session belonged to.
• NewsPlex does not lower its execution priority by default anymore. This should fix the occasional slow download speed problems. The -o command-line option, which used to maintain the execution priority, is now ignored. The new -oi and -ol command-line options allow to lower the priority, if desired.
• The Web interface has a new, frames-based format. It is possible to perform new actions, like changing the zombie days, applying etc\retrievd and checking the database. The line threshold for asynchronous article retrievals is settable. The tables are displayed even when empty and have a slightly different aspect.
• At startup, NewsPlex now checks whether the NNTP and Web server ports are different.
• New command-line option -N makes NewsPlex not wait for a final key press before exiting.
• Specific group access errors when exploring a news-server will not stop the exploration anymore.
• Introduced the news.htm and news.htm files. They allow to start your news-reader just by clicking on them.
• The NPCLIENTS command now lists Web clients as well.
• The Web server is now multitasking, and accepts several requests at the same time. Web sessions are now logged to separate logs\web-host-port files rather than to the journal file, and collected to the previously unused logs\web file when closed. The New client traces issued to the journal file now tell whether this a web browser or a news-reader and fit on a single line.
• Added better dealing with pseudo-news-servers, which sometimes are temporarily not able to provide access to some news-groups. In such cases, during an exploration, NewsPlex will now switch to the next group rather than stopping the exploration.
• Active news-groups offered by a given news-server are now listed separately in the exploration log file.
• If when an article is requested a news-server returns 502 and closes the connection, presumably because some limit has been trespassed, NewsPlex will now reconnect less frequently.
• If the config\groups.yes file was modified in such a way that a file in the index directory would not match anymore, NewsPlex would refuse to start, complaining that Could not mark as active the groups present in index, Group does not match requested pattern. NewsPlex will now also properly delete the index and dataset2 files for no more wanted groups.

Version 3.6 (27 August 2001)

• Fixed the problem of the first news-group listed by the news-server during the exploration not being explored if active, and causing a lost memory block warning at shutdown time.
• The full news-group list is no more logged to per-client log files if it is requested, as it is too long and of little interest (duplicates etc\groups), except if the -v (verbose) command-line option is set. Active news-groups are logged instead, as well as the count of returned entries.
• Fixed the problem of NewsPlex sometimes returning a wrong article on Unix versions (non-reentrancy of strtok).
• Provided the LIST OVERVIEW.FMT command.
• The Sender: header field is now stripped during posting, as with some news-readers it often contains a non-spam-protected email.
• The GetNNTP utility accepts two new command-line options: /b some-string, which allows to send an arbitrary command to the news-server, and /e seconds, which allows to wait before sending anything. In the 1st case, the name of the generated log file includes the command string.
• The NPACTIVE command forgot to send a 215 status line as the first line.
• The NEWGROUPS command is now really implemented. The -N command-line option does not exist anymore.
• Improved proxy error handling. All negotiations are now subject to timeouts and cancellations. Timeouts and unexpected closures are differentiated. Sending errors are a new and separate condition.
• Articles without Subject: no longer cause invalid entries in etc\done and etc\scheduld files on startup.
• Revised the on-line help content. It is now printed to the standard output rather than to the standard error output if the -h command-line option is passed.
• If it is not possible to connect to a proxy at TCP level, NewsPlex will switch to the next proxy from the same proxy group, if any.
• A NpUud utility is now provided. This is a cleaning uudecoder, which extracts uuencoded content from a file, and moves whatever remains (Mail or News headers, or just text) into a .hdr file, named after the first uuencoded file extracted: the file extension is replaced with .hdr if it is not a number, otherwise .hdr is appended to the original file name.
• Unix versions now properly implement socket cancellations, so shutdowns have become as fast as on Windows, and do not wait for all news-readers to disconnect first anymore.

Version 3.5 (21 August 2001)

• NewsPlex is now able to efficiently manage the full Usenet news-group list, thanks to improved data structures and algorithms. Up to a few thousand news-groups can then be activated by news-readers before the performances drop, mostly because of non-scalable directory management in operating systems (there is a file for each active news-group in the index, dataset2 and update directories). Introduced the etc\groups file, which contains the list of all news-groups managed by NewsPlex. Empty files in the index directory are no more used for inactive news-groups. The etc\groups.new is not generated anymore, since news-group addition times are now stored in the etc\groups file.
• NewsPlex now tries to auto-configure itself if at startup it does not find a config directory, a config\servers file or a config\groups.yes file. It will try to locate news-servers on your local network, it will look at files in your computer trying to find out which news-servers you are already using through other tools, and will complete the news-server list with a few public access news-servers. By default, it will try to take all news-groups from all news-servers.
• If the group list is large for a news-server, it is no more logged to the log file in the explore directory.
• Accelerated the performance of news-group operations by using self-balancing binary-trees. The node linkage is no more stored in index files.
• Added the -o command-line option which makes NewsPlex not lower its priority.
• Changed the format of dataset files, adding the Message-ID field to the entries. This allows to check whether a dataset entry really matches the index entry, and also to reconstruct the index files in case some get destroyed, typically by a brutal reboot. In such cases, the newsrc files are cleaned of entries corresponding to the lost index files, so that the corresponding news-groups get explored on all news-servers again and new article retrievals are constructed. In the meantime, articles are temporarily zombies. The directory dataset has been renamed to dataset2.
• news-servers which do not have active news-groups are now explored less frequently.
• The config\servers file now requires a flag (m) to signal the main server, rather than a negative server-number. This also makes the main news-server recognizable as such in the news-servers lists.
• Introduced a new config\servers flag, O or LISTGROUP does not set the current news-group, which allows to deal with news-servers which do not adjust the current news-group when receiving the LISTGROUP news-group request. This is not so easy to detect automatically, hence this flag.
• Eliminated the usage of the config\groups.fix file. Now, the notion of active news-groups replaces the notion of fixed news-groups and statistics are computed based on this.
• Introduced the -X program-name command-line option, which allows to run a program or a command (eg. a uudecoder) each time a new async\xxxxxxxx.ok file is created.
• Removed the 2 second delay when NPSHUT is entered.
• Fixed a problem introduced in version 3.2, together with the update files: NewsPlex would mistakenly delete the existing update file for a news-group, when syncing this news-group back to disk, if there were no updates (additions or deletions of news-server references) to existing article descriptions to be saved, and only new article descriptions have been added. So the next time the news-group index was loaded from disk, it would contain partially obsolete information: some news-server references would be missing and some previously deleted news-server references would reappear. However no article descriptions would be lost. This problem was most visible when deleting a news-server, as news-server references to this news-server would re-appear for some news-groups soon after. NPCHECKGROUPS would also show many invalid news-server references.
• The LIST ACTIVE wildmat command is now implemented.
• If the config\authinfo file had empty lines, NewsPlex would crash.
• XHDR field and XOVER issued without argument would not print information about current article, but rather print an empty list. XHDR also did not process the case of the argument being a Message-ID. NewsPlex will now accept an Message-ID argument for XOVER, which is an extension of the standard syntax.
• Improved the checking of the validity of arguments on telnet and web interface. Crashes should be avoided. Some telnet error codes have been fixed, syntax error messages containing some help are now generated when necessary.
• Implemented the XGTITLE command. It currently does not return real descriptions, but can be for example used instead of LIST ACTIVE.
• LISTGROUP without argument did not work if the current news-group was async.
• NPMARKRETRIEVED and NPFILTER issued an incorrect error message (412 No news group has been selected rather than 500 not implemented) if the current news-group was async.
• If NewsPlex was connected to itself or to another NewsPlex, it would choke and reconnect when article numbers suddenly jump from a small value to 1001, which happens with deferred news-group activation. Now this jump is accepted without reconnecting.
• Created the NPACTIVE command, for listing just active news-groups. Added also a link on the Web page.
• Some commands were not mentioned in the HELP command output.
• The Web page now contains the telnet link.
• Introduced the cost per-news-server flag (cvalue).
• X-Newsposter lines are eliminated from headers of posted articles.
• Certain memory exhaustions occurring during news-server exploration were not recognized as local resource problems and caused useless re-connections to the news-server, as if they were corruptions.
• When an article mistakenly exists under two numbers in the same news-group on a news-server, NewsPlex now logs both numbers, as well as the number in NewsPlex. Previously, the original number on news-server was not provided.
• When deleting news-server references to a specific news-server from a given news-group, because that news-server no longer carries the news-group or because it is being deleted globally (NPDELETESERVER), we now check whether we could perform this operation correctly. For example, sometimes there is not enough memory to access the news-group. If news-server references could not be removed from some news-groups, we leave appropriate content in the newsrc2 file. If the deletion was not complete, the server-number should not be re-used for another news-server.
• Added the x per-news-server flag, which allows to accelerate the retrieval of article descriptions from certain news-servers.
• The -T command-line option, which limits the number of simultaneous parallel news-server explorations works again.
• The full group list on the Web interface is now printed without using a table, so that news-readers display it much faster and use much less memory. For non-active news-groups, only an activation link is proposed.
• NewsPlex now accepts article descriptions where every field is preceded with a spurious blank, and automatically eliminates these blanks. This allows to use news-servers which would previously be unusable, but might have been fine otherwise.
• Fixed the automatic shutdown in minimal mode, which did not happen anymore for the past few versions. There is now a specific exit code to indicate an exit after the end of minimal explorations.
• Replaced all update words in configuration files and messages issued by NewsPlex by explore, when they referred to exploring news-servers. Previously both words were used interchangeably for this purpose. The dontexplore keyword must now be used instead of dontupdate in the config\servers file. The U per-news-server flag remains.
• Introduced a new per-news-server flag: a or attempt retrieval of articles, by Message-ID, even if news-server does not have the news-group or the article in the news-group. If this flag is set, NewsPlex will attempt to always retrieve an article from the news-server, even if the news-server did not say it had it.
• If the -l command-line option is passed, or if the L per-news-server flag is set, NewsPlex will not use GROUP requests anymore to check the existence of a news-group when listing news-groups on news-servers, and will always filter locally the full news-group list obtained from the news-server. NewsPlex used the GROUP request, as an optimization, if a pattern in the config\groups.yes file did not contain wild-cards.
• If an article is a zombie, NewsPlex will now attempt to retrieve it from all the news-servers before reporting it as a zombie to the news-reader. This sometimes allows to obtain an article, in spite of it being apparently deleted from everywhere. Reporting a zombie will often make the news-reader stop retrieving the following articles automatically, so we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
• A time-stamp is now put as the first field of the comment entry in the generated logs\results file. NewsPlex shutdown is no more logged there as a news-server exploration condition.
• In minimal mode, after failing to retrieve an article in 100 news-groups, NewsPlex will stop trying to get one.
• Some error traces, like a 503 timeout, were not logged during the listing of available news-groups, so it was difficult to understand why NewsPlex had to reconnect.
• When retrieving article descriptions from a news-group, NewsPlex now merges the new article numbers into 32 intervals at most, while this was 256 previously. This allows to minimize the number of requests issued to news-servers with incoherent article databases, and to spend much less time overall. The price is getting slightly more regets.
• The etc\popular file is now processed with full error checking.
• NewsPlex now systematically checks after a failed file open whether this was due to the file not existing, or just to a resource exhaustion. Some exotic or ancient compilers only authorize a few dozen open files at a time, and NewsPlex could lose a newsrc2 file this way; it rewrote it, thinking it did not exist before.
• Some log messages produced during news-server exploration have been made more specific. When encountering corrupted single-number ranges, NewsPlex will not promise to recover by re-exploration, because this is not done, nor possible. When processing a news-group which was previously empty on news-server, NewsPlex will no more announce a New news-group but rather a Previously empty news-group.
• Created the NPREWRITEGROUP command.
• Many more binary file patterns are recognized in Subject: lines.
• It is now allowed to have a given news-server listed several times in the config\servers file, as long as the login or the port are different. File names in the explore, list, newsrc2 and xhdr directories, as well as the displayed and logged server names now include the login and the port number if these are non-default.
• Distinct proxy syntax errors are now produced, depending on whether they occur immediately, which might mean the proxy is not of the expected type, or later, when the type of the proxy has already been confirmed.
• Added support for buggy SOCKS4 proxies (proxy socks4b://server-name) and for HTTPS proxies (proxy https://server-name).
• Fixed crashes which occurred if a SOCKS5 or SOCKS5b proxy asked for authentication, while no login/password were defined for it.

Version 3.4 (5 April 2001)

• In the logs\results file, extra info between parentheses, which is most of the time the last error message from news-server, is no more printed if the final status is Ok or if this info is the same as the main diagnostic, that is, has been generated internally. Same simplification has been performed for the Connect failed and Reconnect failed log traces.
• NPCONNECTED could display non-pertinent diagnostic messages for servers which were otherwise quite fine. A similar problem appeared in the logs\results file.
• If the server temporarily returned an empty news-groups list, NewsPlex would assert fail (regression).
• We now avoid printing error codes. Only text messages are provided, which should be unique. Error messages are systematically of the form
  situation: standard-error-string dot newline
  or
  situation: error-msg-from-server newline
• Accelerated NewsPlex shutdown. The downside of the new implementation is that less error information is now available for failed TCP connections.
• If an article description ends just after the Message-ID, NewsPlex will now report a correct error (No tab after Message-ID rather than Message-ID lacks ending bracket).
• The above error can be ignored if the new I flag (allow article description truncation after Message-ID) is set for the news-server. This flag can also recover truncations in the middle of article threading references.
• The NPCLIENTS command now displays the loaded/unloaded status for the current news-group in a separate L column.
• Fixed all places in the code where buffer overflows caused the termination of NewsPlex. Now buffer overflows cause either an internal error, or data are silently truncated.
• Introduced the XHDR NPSUBJECT command.
• Renamed the XHDR SERVREFS command into XHDR NPSERVREFS, since it is specific to NewsPlex.
• Introduced a new news-server flag, D, meaning do not reuse the news-server for an asynchronous article retrieval after it becomes free. This flag should give the news-reader less 500 No server having article is reachable errors if the news-reader tries to retrieve some articles directly when asynchronous article retrievals are enabled.

Version 3.3 (2 March 2001)

• Some items in the Web interface did not work anymore.
• In the connected servers list, some news-server status messages were mistakenly reproduced with the ending newline.
• The NPGLOBALSTATS command did not stop on news-reader disconnect and kept printing the group names and headers to the log file. Also enlarged the ARTS and UNIQ columns for this one and the NPGROUPSTATS command.

Version 3.2 (1 March 2001)

• Fixed the code which emulates XOVER using HEAD. Introduced the H flag in the config\servers file, which can force emulation. We also accept servers where LISTGROUP sometimes does not set the current article in news-groups. We deal with tabs in article headers. Shutdown is now processed immediately during the emulation.
• If AUTHINFO replies are preceded with junk, the junk is now skipped. This avoids delaying the next exploration by hours.
• Introduced the update directory and incremental saving of index files. We now append new article descriptions to the existing index files and save updates about articles (addition or deletion of news-server references) into an update file, except for small index files and when update files grow too large, in which case a rewrite of the index file is performed.
• Introduced the R and r flags for news-servers, which allow to adjust the number of connections allowed.
• NPCLOSE can now be passed 0, which closes all idle news-server connections.
• Shutdown is now taken into account when a news-server is being deleted.
• Since version 3.0, NewsPlex could sometimes forget that it already managed a news-group and start a fresh index file for it. It however appended new article data at the end of the old dataset file, corrupting it. Non-recoverable errors would appear at the following compaction.
• Only one zombie article is now retried at the same time. This allows to reduce the number of news-servers to which NewsPlex is keeping open connections to.
• Introduced deferred news-group handling. A news-group is now handled only after a news-reader enters it for the first time and requests the list of articles.
• NewsPlex would not print a correct (history) line and could even crash if the NPDATASETS command was performed.
• After an article has been posted, NewsPlex will now attempt to schedule an update of the news-group where it has been posted, on the news-server to which it has been posted (that is, the current main news-server). This should make the article visible immediately in the list of articles, as long as the news-server does not delay the posting by itself.

Version 3.1 (21 January 2001)

• NewsPlex now commits database files to disk after writing to them. This allows to better deal with panics in the OS.
• Added the -L command-line option, to report articles scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval as deleted.
• Zombie articles are no more considered as permanently unavailable when articles are retrieved asynchronously. This is a consequence of the etc\done and etc\scheduld files now being cleaned of finished entries at each restart; it is no more a problem to have entries there for a long time, until the zombie expires. Zombies appear with a new Zom status in the list produced by NPASYNC.
• If there are many outstanding asynchronous article retrievals, shutdown should now be faster.
• index files are no more systematically lingering in memory for some time after usage; lingering now depends on the situation. This decreases the memory usage and limits the number of news-groups displayed as accessed.
• Increased the number of file extensions recognized as representing binaries.
• The error message Ignoring GROUP error because retrieval by msgid was sometimes issued while the connection could not be obtained at all.
• When NewsPlex was using LISTGROUP to change the current news-group (as a workaround for news-server bugs), it printed (null) followed by dots. Now, only dots are printed; they represent the retrieved article numbers.
• Zombies are now checked every 30 minutes, by Message-ID, on all news-servers except those which could not be explored successfully during the last attempt and those which are currently being explored. This often allows to get an article in spite of it being declared as deleted before.
• news-servers scoring now takes into account the number of articles already retrieved from them. This allows to better appreciate their value when all the previously retrieved articles have been too small to reliably determine the speed.
• The shutdown condition is now detected when switching to another news-server for article retrieval. This allows to produce less log messages.
• The 420 response code for XOVER first-last requests was incorrectly considered as an error.
• Before trying to reconnect to a news-server after a disconnect, NewsPlex will now first check if there is not a spare connection already open to the same news-server and use it instead. This increases the speed and reduces the number of connections open to news-servers.
• Articles scheduled for article retrieval are now tagged with an A flag in index files, and with "/a " (or "/ra " if read) in the From: field when retrieving article descriptions.
• Introduced the telnet.htm and web.htm files.
• The logs\clients and logs\summary files are now limited in size. A new file is started and the old one is renamed to .bak when they grow over a certain size.
• The NPCONNECTED command and the Web page now display four additional data about each connected news-server: the state of the connection (0 means not yet connected and 31 means connected successfully; additional states are possible too), the number of TCP connects performed using this entry, the number of bytes sent, and the number of bytes received.
• This help file now shows the correct pathname separators, given the OS for which it is targeted. Previously, Unix-style forward slashes were used all the time.
• If a temporary news-server overload condition appears when NewsPlex is trying to reconnect after a disconnect during an update, it will wait 10 seconds and retry up to 50 times rather than abandoning the whole update operation. This allows to use news-servers which experience such overload conditions frequently.

Version 3.0 (11 December 2000)

• Some rare article description corruptions involving a premature end-of-list mark from news-server were handled sub-optimally. The error message issued did not provide the offending article description and NewsPlex would not recover till the next news-server exploration.
• Introduced a new organization for the article database, while allows to dramatically (4-5 times) decrease the amount of memory used by NewsPlex and to speed operations. The previous single database directory has been replaced with two directories, dataset and index. Only index files are loaded into memory. Also, much less memory is now used to store the information from them. Additionally, binary tree information is saved to index files, which allows to avoid the recomputing of it at next load time.
  The newsrc directory has been renamed into newsrc2, so that if by accident you run an older version of NewsPlex in a directory set up with the current NewsPlex, the article database does not get corrupted. The format of files inside did not change.
  NewsPlex will automatically convert the old article databases into the new format at startup time. The old database and newsrc directories will be renamed into *.old.
• Added the possibility of retrieving articles by Message-ID from the async news-group. If a news-reader has seen an article in the async news-group, and this article has been deleted since (by hand or by another news-reader), it might try to get it by Message-ID. NewsPlex now replies this request with a clean deleted status rather than with a not implemented status. Of course, if the article is still there, it will be provided.
• Added the XHDR SERVREFS command, which displays the news-server references for articles in current news-group.
• If NPRENUMBER was used, the binary tree used to locate articles by Message-ID would progressively get corrupted. This could cause duplicate addition of new article descriptions to the article database if the renumbering occurred while a news-group update process was running for the same news-group.
• In case of startup errors, NewsPlex will now ask the operator to press the Enter key before terminating. This allows to read the error messages before a window is closed, for example. These messages are otherwise logged to the journal file.
• The NPDELETESERVER command is more verbose.
• During news-server explorations, some errors causing an interruption were not correctly reported and the next exploration would occur quite late, as if everything went fine.
• A new locking scheme in the article database allows full concurrency between different operations concerning different news-groups and a correct reporting of corruptions inside index files. The NPACCESSED command and the Web interface show 2 additional fields for each news-group: the number of threads waiting to access it and the status flags.
• The NPCHECKGROUPS command now also deletes references to news-servers no more present in the config\servers file. NPDELETESERVER accepts even non-existing news-server numbers, and allows to clean single invalid news-server references. Performing NPCHECKGROUPS is like performing NPDELETESERVER for all invalid references.
• If during asynchronous article retrieval NewsPlex notices an invalid news-server number for an article, it will clean all invalid references in the current news-group.
• Shutdown requests are now recognized during the following operations:
  • marking as retrieved of articles logged in etc\retrievd (-M command-line option)
  • news-group filtering (NPFILTER)
  • news-group listing (LIST)
  • computation of global and per-news-group statistics (NPGLOBALSTATS and NPGROUPSTATS)
  • age trimming of news-groups (NPDELETEOLD)
• NewsPlex will no more crash if a too long news-group name is entered.
• NewsPlex now detects articles which on a given news-server appear a second time in the same news-group, under a different number. They will be considered as the same article.
• Further corruptions are detected in article descriptions: article numbers not greater than the previous one, article numbers out of requested range.
• Implemented the previously forgotten XHDR REFERENCES command.
• The NPRESTART command no longer closes the current connection. Once the NewsPlex welcome message is displayed again, it is possible to enter further commands. The previous context of the connection (current news-group, current article, etc.) is lost however.
• Added a new command, NPAPPLYRETRIEVD, which is the runtime equivalent of the -M command-line option.
• After NPRESTART, NewsPlex would forget the logins and passwords set through the -P and -U command-line options and stop requiring them.
• Improved log messages. Notably, when printing dots to signal incoming article descriptions, NewsPlex will better handle error messages.
• NPFILTER now prints how many filters have been applied.
• If at startup time there are still some asynchronous article retrievals left, NewsPlex will write a new etc\scheduld file, containing only those entries and delete the etc\done file. The whole process should take much less time now. The information about articles in async\xxxxxxxx.log file is also more readable now.
• Added the -v (verbose) command-line option.
• NewsPlex will now collapse neighboring ranges of article numbers to explore on news-server when it finds there are more than 256 of them. This allows to issue much less requests to news-servers, at the price of sometimes getting an article description twice (reget).
• Fixed the operation with SOCKS5 proxies which require a login and a password.
• Added the -c and -C command-line options for cleanup.
• New command, NPTASKS for listing both currently running and scheduled tasks.
• The -T command-line option now really does what it is supposed to do. Previously, it would limit the total number of threads used, and not only the number of threads used to explore news-servers.
• NewsPlex now correctly detects the internet presence if you have an ADSL modem.
• The asynchronously retrieved articles are now deleted from the async directory only after 300 seconds. This allows to potentially retrieve them several times in case of problems, and to support news-readers which do not cache retrieved articles.
• The newsrc2 files are now written in a fault-tolerant way and checks for success are systematically performed.
• The Flags field in the config\servers file is now documented. Flags are now letters rather than a number. Whether a news-server allows posting or disallows is now displayed as a flag (P or N), rather than in a specific column.
• Now if a client news-reader does not have administrator access, retrieved article headers are stripped of Path: and Xref: entries, which give the identity of the news-servers from which the articles come.
• The temporary files in the newsrc2 directory are now written progressively, as the news-server update process progresses, rather than being periodically rewritten completely. This reduces the number of disk writes and allows full recovery in case of crashes during the update. Temporary files are recovered the next time the main newsrc2 file is used. NewsPlex also deals with duplicate news-group name entries in newsrc2 files now, by merging the article numbers.
• When listing news-groups on a news-server using patterns, NewsPlex now checks whether the news-group names returned by the news-server match what was asked for. This is because some news-servers sometimes ignore the mask and return their full news-groups list instead.
• NPCHECKGROUPS now deletes the index and dataset files corresponding to unwanted news-groups.
• If some articles are scheduled for asynchronous article retrieval, and not currently being retrieved, NewsPlex will now try to retrieve them as soon as a news-server is no more used internally. This allows to get much faster article retrievals from news-server which allow few connections at the same time.
• NewsPlex now checks the available disk space when writing articles to disk during asynchronous article retrieval, and when writing the list files for news-server.
• Added the -l command-line option, to force requesting the full news-groups list from news-servers when exploring them and perform local filtering of interesting news-groups.
• The -x command-line option does not cause the echoing of the G flag to the logs\results file for each news-server anymore.
• In minimal mode, the number of tentatives of getting an article from a news-group has been limited to 10.
• The logs\cliXXX files have been replaced with logs\cli-host-port files, for better observability.
• NewsPlex now notices the disconnects of client news-readers even when itself being in the process of connecting to news-servers, and stops connecting immediately.
• If article descriptions are short, and do not contain the Lines information, NewsPlex will still accept them.
• Limited the number of open connections to a news-servers to 8.
• The exit code can now also reflect situations occurring after NewsPlex startup. For example, requesting a shutdown with NPSHUT will make NewsPlex exit with code 39.
• The etc\done, etc\scheduld and logs\summary files have been moved out of the async directory.
• NewsPlex will now try to use LISTGROUP if GROUP returns that the group does not exist. It will also ignore GROUP errors when trying to retrieve an article by Message-ID.

Version 2.9 (24 Sep 2000)

• The final dot on a line by itself in fact collated to the preceding article description corruption (see comment for version 2.7) is now also detected for short lines, which would previously be considered as split lines. This avoids a long and useless waiting for next article descriptions and a news-server connection loss.
• More article description corruptions occurring during news-server explorations are now recovered without reconnecting.
• More news-server welcome messages are recognized as throttling rather than as overload and cause less frequent exploration attempts.