Quick Start Guide

The first step on the way to get started is to create a new Usenet server. If you don't know what a Usenet server is you can read more about Usenet here. There is a bunch of good servers out there and I'm sure you can pick one for yourself so I won't go to that in detail.



Fill in your account details and click OK. Please note that you will have to enable at least either one of the available servers before you can continue. On the "Data files" tab you can change the location where the data files for this news server are stored. You might want to double check that you have enough space on the intended location as these data files can get rather large.

After clicking OK application will proceed to download a list of available newsgroups from the server. Once the listing is complete you can start adding newsgroups from the list of available groups. You can check when listing is ready on the downloads tab. How long it takes depends on your connection speed but with any reasonable connection this should not take longer than a few seconds.



When the listing is complete click back to Servers and groups tab and start adding your favourite news groups.



Clicking Add group button brings up a window where you can search for groups by name and also sort them either alphabetically or by size. The search supports regular expressions. In this guide we'll be looking for Linux binaries (simply press Enter to trigger search after entering search criteria).



When you click OK the selected groups appear under the configured server in the main list. As you know Usenet and News are based on headers. So obviously the next step is to update the group headers. (Newsflash Plus also supports NZB files which allow you go to skip downloading the headers. More on that later).



Downloading headers might take a long time, depending on the size of the group and and your internet connection speed. Again you can check the progress of the update process in the Downloads tab. When Newsflash Plus is working on downloading the headers it tries to do a lof of preprocessing in order to make browsing the headers later as fast as possible. Unfortunately this processing means that the headers that are being downloaded are not immediately available for browsing. If you don't want to wait for the whole process to finish you can simply click "Write headers". It will write the currently downloaded headers to the disk and make them available for browsing. Once writing is complete the process continues to download more headers automatically.



When you have a bunch of headers either by letting the update process to finish or by doing "Write headers" mid process opening the group and browsing for data is very easy. A group can be opened from the main tab simply by douple clicking it or by choosing "Open" from the menu. When the group is opened a new tab is opened displaying the group contents.



Either simply double click on a row to download a single item, or then select a bunch of rows and choose "Download" either from the toolbar or from the context menu to initiate a batch download. Just as before once you set off a bunch of downloads you can view and control them in the Downloads tab.



I hope this step by step guide got you well into using Newsflash Plus. If you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to send them to me.