You can find &knode; in the K Menu under the Internet entry: the menu entry KNode launches the program. If the entry for &knode; can not be found or if &knode; does not appear after clicking on the menu entry, read Questions and Answers. The main window of &knode; should now be displayed on your desktop as shown; on the first start, the settings dialogue will be invoked. Setting up &knode; &knode; after first start &knode; after first start The windows shows the menu bar, the toolbar below and the status pane at the buttom. The area between the toolbar and the status pane is occupied by a three-part window. There is a folder view, which currently contains only three entries: The folder Outbox The folder Drafts The folder Sent When &knode; is completely and correctly configured, the news servers and the subscribed news groups will appear there. In the upper section is the article view; it is currently empty and does not show any articles. Directly below the article view is the article window; the body of the currently-selected article appears there. These windows are also blank at the moment, as there are no articles, of course. You should not be concerned, though, as before reading and publishing news some things have to be configured; this will be covered by the following section. We are now beginning the setting up of &knode;. Most settings are not important for daily use, but you should know what settings are possible and what they are for. Some may skip the Quickstart chapter but those who prefer a quick start will just glance over the manual anyway. For others, especially those who have not any or much experience with a news reader, this chapter offers the chance to fully perform the configuration, although some things may become clear only later on. Via SettingsConfigure KNode... you will enter the preferences dialogue of &knode;. The figure shows the dialogue. Dialogue for entering personal information Entering personal information Entering personal information The dialogue is divided into two parts: in one part there is a treeview, in which the top entry Identity is already highlighted; in the other part is the corresponding input dialogue -- these settings relate to the identity with which you navigate through the newsgroups. If you have already configured your personal settings in the &kcontrolcenter; before the first start of &knode;, they will be adopted. In the field Name you enter your name, ⪚ Joe Miller or Mary Gordon. This name will later appear in the newsgroups as sender, and can be seen by anyone. Filling out the field Name is mandatory. In most newsgroups, it is considered polite and appropriate to appear with one's real name; other newsgroups are less strict about this. But, there are also cases when one would not want to appear with one's real name, ⪚ in newsgroups where one would like to (and can) talk about very personal matters without being exposed; these groups mostly do tell you in their Charter that the anonymity of their members is explicitly approved. For those special cases, &knode; offers settings that can be adjusted to each newsgroup individually; further information can be found under Group local Identities. The input field Organisation is optional and does not have to be filled out. You can enter, ⪚, the name of your company or your university if you use &knode; there; if you leave this field blank, it will often be filled out later by your Internet service provider. The email address you enter here will be used as sender in news articles, &ie; as actual address of the author, in conjunction with the real name (set in the field Name). The field Email Address shows up when someone wants to reply to you by email: the email will be sent to the address entered here. Many newsreaders display the sender address together with the name in the Header of the article. Filling out the Email Address field is mandatory. Note that the e-mail address will only be used for replies to you if the field Reply-to Address is not filled out; in this case, the field Email will be ignored for replies and the address given under Reply-to Address will be used. Reply-to Address offers you the possibility to enter a different address than your sender e-mail address: if someone replies to you by email this address will be displayed as target address in the reply. An example for using Reply-to Address would be that you write the article at the office during the day but want to receive the answer in your home inbox, because your boss co-reads your mail. Only enter an e-mail address in that field if it actually differs from the field Email Address. Some news readers deliberately set this to an invalid e-mail address in order to prevent spam mails from being received; what could happen, though, is that a reader sends an e-mail to this invalid address which you will therefore never receive. You should drop a note about this in the signature. If you enter an email address here every article will be sent to the usenet and to this email address. If you have configured the use of PGP or GnuPG you can chose your signing key with Change.... If this option is selected, the file specified under Signature File will be used as Signature. The field Signature File determines the file, the content of which is appended to each of your articles. The field is only enabled if the option Use a signature from file is selected. The signature file is a simple text file, which should not contain more than four lines; it can, for example, contain a reference to your homepage with the corresponding link, your postal address with your telephone number (which would then be of course visible to the whole world with every article) or just a cool quote. The signature is your brand, so to speak, which will mark all your articles; therefore, your signature should not be designed sloppily or in the long run annoying to others: an old joke that one would have to read over and over again does not foster sympathy or the interest of the other newsgroup subscribers. You can directly enter the file name of the signature file but it is more convenient to use the button Choose.... This opens a file open dialogue and you can conveniently choose the signature file with the mouse. The button Edit File enables you, after choosing the file, to edit the signature. It is not necessary to include a separation line in the signature file as &knode; inserts it automatically. If this option is activated, the signature file is not handled as a text file, but as a program. The signature file will be started as a program and the output will be used as a signature. Through that you'll be able to chose a signature by accident or to use fortune to generate a cool slogan every time. If this option is selected you can enter the text of the signature directly in the input field below. Please make sure that in this case also your signature should not contain more than 4 lines. A separation line is not necessary as &knode; inserts it automatically. You can later adapt the identity individually for each of the subscribed groups via the Preferences dialogue, ⪚ you can specify an English signature for English groups and a German one for German groups. Apart from the language it is also possible to have context-sensitive signatures, ⪚ your favourite recipe in a cooking group or the names of your twelve cats in a cat owner group. You find more in the section Group local identities. The next step in the configuration covers the news account. Now we must tell &knode; about where we get the news from or where to send the articles to later on. In the tree view on the right, there is an Accounts entry; click on it with the mouse; then, two sub entries will be opened out. Choose the News entry, because we first want to configure the news account: the list of accounts is still empty. To create a new account click on New.... The following dialogue appears: The New Account dialogue The New Account dialogue The New Account dialogue The Name field can be filled in as you like; the text you enter will later be visible in the folder view. You could, for example, enter the name of your Internet Provider; for our example we enter the name My News Account. The next field is labelled Server. Unlike the field Name, what you enter here is important. The name of the news server is fixed and you should be able to get it from your Internet service provider; if you do not know the name of the news server, you should get it now: without this information you can not read any news. If your Internet service provider doesn't own a news server you can use a public one (universities often provide public news servers.) For our example configuration we enter the name news.server.com; you will, of course, enter the real name of your news server. If you want to use &knode; with a local news server, enter the name localhost here. Port, the next field, has already a default value. The Port designates, roughly speaking, a data channel on which the server listens for whether someone wants to retrieve news: it defaults to the value 119, which is applicable in most cases; therefore, we do not change this default for our example. The time value you enter here is used if you have established a connection to the news server and if, for whatever reason, no data is received from or transmitted to the news server: after the specified time has elapsed &knode; will automatically disconnect. This, amongst other things, relieves the server of unnecessary connections which would otherwise reduce its availability for other subscribers; it also makes sure that an automatically-established Internet connection is not held unnecessarily even if no data is being sent or received. This settings mainly makes sense if one receives and reads news online; for local news servers it is of almost no importance. If this waiting time is set too low, there can be waiting periods if you read a longer article and do not do anything for some time: &knode; will have cancelled the connection to the server by then (after the time period has elapsed) and has to reestablish it, causing a delay. If the waiting time is set too high you might waste online time whilst doing nothing (perhaps increasing your phone bill). If &knode; connects to the news server it waits no longer than the time specified here for an answer; if the period is exceeded &knode; cancels the connection attempt and you will get an error message stating that the server is not responding. Depending on the quality of your Internet account and the news server's current load there can be busy periods where &knode; cancels the connection; if this happens frequently, you should set this setting to a higher value. If this setting is selected, &knode; additionally requests the available group descriptions; they will be displayed in the Subscribe to Newsgroups dialogue. There is not a group description for every group, so it is not an error if no group description is shown when subscribing to a group later on. The option Server requires authentication needs only to be selected if your news server requires a user name and a password when retrieving articles; you can find out if this is the case from your Internet service provider or the server's maintainer. If you do not know if this setting is necessary forget about selecting it for now: if you encounter an error later on, you can try selecting it then. Otherwise, select this option and enter your user name under User and the associated password under Password. By now you have completed the setup of your news account. You can confirm and save your settings by clicking on the OK button: as soon as you have done that, the account will appear in the list by the name that you entered in Name earlier; and, if you have a close look, you will see that the account also appears in the folder view. Using the Subscribe button you could get directly to the dialogue for subscribing to news groups; but, we still have more to do so we'll ignore it for now: there are several ways that lead to the goal. In the Managing multiple news accounts chapter you can learn how to work with multiple news accounts, but first we will stay with this one; in most cases, one account is sufficient. Please note that some Internet providers only allow retrieving news from their news server if you are connected to the Internet through them. We will now move on to configuring the email account; in order to do that, click on the Mail entry in the tree view on the left. After selecting Mail in the tree view, the following Dialogue Box appears. Dialogue Box for setting up the mail account Setting up the mail account Setting up the mail account You will notice this Dialogue Box is very similar to the news account settings Dialogue Box; but why do we need an email account in a newsreader? Sometimes you need to answer to the author of an article directly, without posting to the newsgroup; for example, when you want to make a very personal comment or want to correct an error. Sometimes an email is more appropriate than a public remark. That's why &knode; provides the possibility to reply by email; if you want to use this feature you must tell &knode; how to send emails: you just need to insert the mail server's address. If you have already configured an email account, ⪚ with &kmail;, you can reuse the settings used there. If this option is active &knode; will use the mail program which is configured in the control centre; the other options in this dialogue will then be disabled. The name (address) of your mail server as provided by your Internet service provider or system administrator; all you have to do here is enter the mail server's name in the Server field. In our example we entermail.server.de If you have one you can send your mail via a local mail server; if this is the case local mail server enter localhost in the Server field. Again, the Port field has a default value; in this case it's port 25. You should not need to change this, unless your ISP has a very exotic configuration and tells you to do so. We do not change this for the example. This value is important: if you have established a connection with your mail server and there is no data transfer occurring &knode; cancels the connection to your mailserver after the specified amount of time has elapsed. When &knode; tries to connect to the mail server it will wait this long for a reply from the server; if this time is exceeded, you will get a error message. Depending on the quality of your connection and the actual load of your mail server you might get long reply times; if &knode; cancels the connection due to this, you should increase the timeout. Some ISPs only allow you to send email using their mail server after you have checked your mailbox for new mail: this reduces spamming. For the same reasons, some ISPs will only allow you to send mail using their mailservers if you are online with them or if you are logged in at the mailserver; for example, this is the normal configuration at GMX and isn't supported by &knode; or &kmail; yet. With the Appearance dialogue you are given the ability to set the colours, the character code and the font size of the text in the article window; the picture below shows the dialogue. Setting up the Appearance dialogue Setting up the Appearance dialogue Setting up the Appearance dialogue If you select this option you can adjust the colour settings of &knode; in the list field below; to change a colour setting do a double-click with the &LMB; on the list entry to open the &kde; colour-selection dialogue. The colour selection can only be configured after the checkbox has been checked; otherwise, a double-click on the list entries won't do anything. If the Use custom colours setting is selected &knode; won't use colours which have been changed later globally for &kde; but will only use the colours defined here instead. If you select this setting you can adjust the fonts which &knode; uses for the display in the list field below; to choose a font do a double-click with the &LMB; on the list entry to open the &kde; font-selection dialogue. The font can only be configured after the checkbox has been checked; otherwise, a double click on the list entries won't do anything. If the setting Use custom fonts is selected &knode; won't use later changes to the global font settings for &kde; but will use the fonts defined here instead. Now click on Reading news and then on the General sub-entry; the figure below shows the dialogue containing the preferences you can configure there. General Preferences Dialogue The General Preferences dialogue The General Preferences dialogue You don't need to change most of these settings, but we will discuss them step-by-step to give you an overview of the possibilities of &knode;. If this box is checked &knode; tries to request new articles from the server when selecting a newsgroup. These settings especially make sense when you use &knode; together with a local news server: downloading the messages obviously only works when the server is reachable; for a server which is only reachable via an Internet connection, this setting rarely makes sense and should stay deactivated. If your system isn't set up to establish an Internet connection if necessary, you will get an error message each time you select a newsgroup. If you want to keep control over when a connection to the server is established, the GroupGet new articles menu option is appropriate. This sets a restriction on the number articles which are requested from the server while downloading. The value configured here is for each newsgroup separately. If this is set, for instance, to 300 only the 300 newest articles of the newsgroup are requested; other articles will be discarded. For newsgroups with relatively high traffic you might lose articles if this value is too low; this especially occurs when you've just subscribed to a newsgroup or only occasionally download articles and the traffic for this reason rises above the value specified here. Articles you have opened in the article window are marked as read after the number of seconds specified here. If you set this value to be relatively high you avoid articles you have just glanced at being marked as read; on the other hand, it can be annoying for relatively short articles, for which you need less time to read than specified: if you browsed too quickly through the articles they would stay unread even though you have read them. Therefore, you should adjust this value to your personal preferences. Sometimes an article will be posted to more than one group; this is known as crossposting. If you activate this option, those crossposted articles will be marked as read in all the newsgroups to which they were posted if you read it in one newsgroup. If this option is selected the lines in the article list are scrolled smoothly instead of jerkily. This setting lets a discussion be displayed completely (over multiple answer levels) if you click on the plus in front of the discussion; if this setting isn't checked, only the immediate answers to the current article are displayed. Here you can toggle whether the threads are expanded by default or not. Here you can toggle whether the scoring column should be shown in the article view. Here you can toggle whether the column with the number of lines should be shown in the article view. Here you can configure how much memory &knode; should use for the caching of the headers. Here you can configure, how much memory &knode; should use for the caching of the articles. Here you can change some navigation properties of &knode;. Normally everything here is switched off, but if you don't like this kind of navigation you can change it. The keyboard behaviour between &knode; and &kmail; is a bit different; with the Emulate the keyboard behaviour of KMail switch you can activate the same keyboard behaviour as in &kmail; for &knode;. If the box Switch to next group is checked, &knode; automatically switches to the next group if you mark all articles as read. If Close the current thread is checked, &knode; automatically closes a thread if you mark it as read. If Go to next unread thread is checked, &knode; automatically shows the next thread if you mark the the previous thread as read. If Close the current threadis checked, &knode; automatically closes a thread if you choose to ignore it. If Go to next unread thread is checked, &knode; automatically shows the next thread if you choose to ignore the previous one. To sort the articles you have the possibility to score them. The standard score is 0: a higher score means that the article is interesting; a lower score means it is less interesting. In the middle of the window you see a big, white area; here you can see your scoring rules. Scoring rules are used by &knode; to score the incoming articles automatically; if, for example, a person always posts nonsense you can automatically score the articles of that person down and hide them. With the buttons below the list of scoring-rules you can edit, add, remove and copy a rule. We will skip this feature for now, because it is not essential for the setup of &knode;. You can learn more about scoring; in the chapter Scoring, watching and ignoring. Normally you only need the functions ignore and watch; this simply shows if a thread is interesting or not. Here you can configure a default score for the ignored threads; choosing the ScoringIgnore Thread menu item will give this score to all the posts in that thread, and will apply that score also to future posts that follow up the thread. If an article is interesting, it will get a score above 0. Here you can enter the default score for those articles; choosing the ScoringWatch Thread menu item will give this score to all the posts in that thread, and will apply that score also to future posts that follow up the thread. You can use the W key to watch a thread or the I key to ignore it. This screenshot shows the filter settings. The filter settings The filter settings The filter settings This dialogue shows two lists. The upper list, labelled Filters, shows all defined filters; when you use &knode; for the first time, you will only see the predefined filters. With the buttons Add, Delete, Edit and Copy you can add new filters or delete filters which are no longer needed; we will skip this feature for now, because it is not essential for the setup of &knode;. You can find more-detailed information about filters in Defining and using filters. The lower list, labelled Menu, shows the appearance of the View Filter menu, which you can reach from the menu bar; the order of the filters in the this menu can be configured in this list. The Up button shifts the selected filter one position up. Try it: select the second filter and press Up; this entry will then go up one position. The Down button does the opposite action: select the filter you just shifted one up and pressDown until it reaches its old position. With the two buttons Add Separator and Remove Separator you can visually group the filters on the menu. The separators are shown as ==== in the list; in the Menu they show up as some more-appealing horizontal lines. Try adding separator; then, select the separator and remove it by pressing Remove separator. Any changes you make here, you can see in ViewFilter after closing this dialogue. In this dialogue you can set how the single header lines are displayed in the article window. The Customise displayed article headers Dialogue The Customise displayed article headers dialogue The Customise displayed article headers dialogue This list shows all the header lines which are to be display in the article window. The identifiers at the left will be displayed alongside the header lines in < > to their right; the header lines are taken from each message, ⪚ for From the From header line will be used (indicating who send the message). Using Edit you can alter the shown identifiers, alter the header line shown by each identifier and change the font settings of the text used. To make things clearer, we'll now simply select the From:<From> entry in the list and open the dialogue for editing the header display by clicking on Edit. The Header Properties Dialogue The Header Properties dialogue The Header Properties dialogue The Header selection box shows the entry From: that is the name of the header line for the sender, as present in the article and evaluated by the newsreader. If you drop down the selection box &knode; shows a range of other identifiers, which stand all for a certain header lines in the article: for now, we'll leave the From identifier configured; we'll work with this list later, when we add a header line to the display. This field holds the name you'd like to be later shown in the article window as a label alongside the actual header line text; for example, for the From header line the label From is used. If you leave this field blank, only the content of the header line appears in the article window; this is, for example, the default setting for the Subject header line. We won't change anything here either, for now. Here you can influence the way the 'Displayed Name' text is displayed; in our case, the Bold attribute is selected for the name From, &ie; the text will be shown in bold letters in the article window. Of course, you can combine different attributes, for example Bold and Underlined. Here you can influence the way the header text is displayed in the article window; for example, if the Italic entry is selected the sender, ⪚ John Doe <johndoe@doubleguns.com> will appears in an italic font. To explain the possibilities of this dialogue to you we're going to add a new header line to the display. This pictures shows the dialogue with the header line X-Newsreader. The Header Properties Dialogue The Header Properties dialogue The Header Properties dialogue It would be nice if one could see which newsreader another subscriber uses in the article window; it is actually quite easy to do this because there is a (optional) header line which contains the necessary information. Drop down the Header selection field and select the X-Newsreader entry from the list. In the Displayed name field, enter Newsreader. Now you can select any attribute for the display of the field and its content; next, acknowledge your input with the OK: the new header line appears now in the list and will later be shown in the article window. Use the up and Down buttons to arrange the order of the headers in the article window. The statement that the new header line will be shown in the article window is actually pretty optimistic, because the entry X-Newsreader isn't required for Usenet articles; therefore, not all articles will contain that header line: if the line doesn't exist, the according entry simply won't be shown. You can get more information about headers at http://www.kirchwitz.de/~amk/dni/headerzeilen (german) If this is active, the headers will be 'beautified' a bit; otherwise, only the plain text is shown. If this option is active, the text wrapping in the viewer will be automatically corrected. If this is active empty lines at the end of the article will be automatically hidden. If this setting is activated, the signature of the sender is displayed in the article window; if it isn't, the signature is suppressed. Please notice that &knode; can display the signature correctly only if it can be separated correctly from the article content in the current article: there are newsreaders which do this separation incorrectly. Two - characters followed by a   (space) is correct. Many participants in the newsgroups give hints on their homepage or say that they have intentionally erroneously specified their Email addresses in the header fields: if you disable displaying the signature, you might lose this information; on the other hand, you might save yourself from reading strange quotes. If this is active, all text format tags in the message like *bold*, /italic/ and _underline_ are shown directly in the viewer. These text-format tags are an unofficial standard. To display the quoted text in another size or colour, &knode; needs to recognise that it's quoted text. Quoted text is normally marked with a > at the beginning of the line, but sometimes there are other characters. In this field you can enter all characters that should mark quoted text. If this setting is marked, &knode; tries to display the contents of possible attachment directly in the window when opening an article; for instance, a picture would be displayed directly below the article text. Additionally, you have the possibility to save the attachment or open it with the application you have associated with the MIME type of the attachment by using the context menu. If this box is checked, attachments are opened with the external program which is configured for the MIME type; if there is no such association, a dialogue for saving a file is opened and you can save the attachment to a separate file. Articles which are sent as Multipart MIME contain the text of the message in multiple formats, for example as raw text and HTML; the newsreader decides which part of the article is displayed. This setting makes it possible for the other formats to be opened as if they were attachments with a mouse click. If this setting is disabled, alternative contents are not displayed. Here you can select which browser is used for displaying links you clicked on in a message. Currently, you can either select the Netscape Navigator or the default, &konqueror;; the selected browser has to be installed, of course. When you post articles with &knode; the settings in the following dialogue box are used. The Technical Settings dialogue The Technical Settings dialogue The Technical Settings dialogue If you choose the wrong settings here your articles could be unreadable or not sendable at all, so please be careful with these settings. Here you can choose the charset used for encoding your articles. Normally this is US-ASCII for English speaking countries, but your charset may differ. The default is the charset used in your global &kde; settings, so you should not have to change this. When you want to post articles in newsgroups with other charsets (⪚ eastern European or Asian) you can set the required charset here. Here you set the encoding of the characters for the message transfer; you can choose between 8-bit and 7-bit (quoted-printable). If you choose 8-bit encoding most special characters are transfered correctly; this is, for example, the normal option for the German groups (de.*). If you choose quoted-printable 8-bit characters (⪚ German umlauts or special characters) are send as encoded 7-bit characters. In the English newsgroups 7-bit encoding is quite normal. If this option is active, &knode; uses your default charset for replying instead of the charset of the article you're answering on. When this is active, &knode; generates its own Message-IDs for all articles you post. The Message-ID must be unique worldwide: there would otherwise be collisions between messages with the same Message-ID and the news server would reject the second article because it thinks this article has already been received. A Message-ID consists of a valid FQDN (Full Qualified Domain Name); this means it looks similar to an email address with an identification before the @ and the domain. The identification is generated by &knode; automatically, but you must provide a valid domain name in Hostname; if you do not have your own domain, you should not activate this option — let the newsserver generate a Message-ID for you. An example for a valid domain would be: kde.org; a Message-ID generated with this domain would look like: 934lek9934@kde.org An unique identification is only guaranteed if you have your own domain. Even when you do not use &knode; for generating your Message-IDs there may be collisions when you are using a local newsserver; for example, leafnode generates a Message-ID which it derives from the local hostname. You can get more information about this and how to own a free domain at http://www.qad.org/faq/faq-messageid.html. Here you enter the Hostname of your computer; this is used to generate the Message-ID. If you do not have your own domain you should not activate this option — let the newsserver generate a Message-ID for you. Using the example above this would be: kde.org. Here you can enter X-Headers which are not provided by &knode;; for example, X-No-Archive: yes, which can be used to prevent your articles from being archived by archive services such as Google. X-Headers are experimental headers, which are not included in the standard for Internet-Messages; they are, for example, used for extended information transfer. To prevent collisions with later standard headers, they have a X- prefix. When this option is checked &knode; does not include the corresponding line in the Header before posting. This header is used for identification of the newsreader the article was written in; apart from statistical reasons, this allows non-standard newsreaders to be identified. You should not activate this option — &knode; has no need to hide. The Composer Settings dialogue The Composer Settings dialogue The Composer Settings dialogue Here you can set the column number at which &knode; wraps the line; also, you can deactivate the automatic word-wrapping completely. It is recommended to use no more than 76 characters even if you are able to display more: many Usenet users use text-based newsreaders which can not display more than 80 characters and it is difficult to read your articles in such a newsreader if you increase this value — this would reduce the probability of your articles being read at all. When you write a new article or a followup, your signature is appended automatically if you have configured one in SettingsConfigure KNode...Identity. When you write a followup, &knode; inserts an introduction phrase before the quoted original text. You can put arbitrary text here; you can also use the variables which &knode; extracts from the original article, ⪚ the name of the author or the date the article was written. The following variable are available: %NAME The name of the original author; %DATE The date on which the original article was written; %EMAIL The original author's email address; %MSID The Message-ID of the original article; %GROUP The name of the newsgroup the article comes from. Keep this short, because this introductory line appears in every followup: a long introductory line can be as repelling as a long signature. On %DATE %NAME wrote in %MSID Let us assume the original article was written by Konqui on Saturday the 17th of June at 17:42:32 - 0500. The article has the Message-ID <8igdg5.3vvijgt.3@lizard.physos.com>. &knode; will then insert the following introductionary line. On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 17:42:32 +0200 Konqui wrote in <8igdg5.3vvijgt.3@lizard.physos.com>: When this is checked, the quoted text is wrapped at the correct border value; hence, every new line will be at the correct quoting level. When this is activated not only the text of the original message, but also the signature of the author, is quoted in a reply. Quoting a signature is unnecessary and is often considered impolite. Normally the cursor will appear below the whole message when answering; with this option turned on the cursor appears below the introduction phrase. This is especially helpful if you quote an article and wish to write between the quoted lines from top to bottom. You can define an external editor here which is opened by selecting ToolsStart external editor in the Composer window. When Start external editor automatically is checked the external editor is opened directly. Notice the %f after the name of the editor: this is a variable for the filename of the article you want to edit; do not delete this — you will get an error message when opening the external editor if you do. If you have problems with starting your external editor, the reason may be that the editor starting in "the background"; this is called forking: &knode; only notices the sub-process started and has finished, and thinks you have quit the editor. The editor gvim is an example for this; you can disable the forking of gvim with the commandline switch -f. It is recommended that you refer to the documentation of your editor you are experiencing this problem. If you want to use gvim in Specify Editor enter the following: gvim -f %f If this option is active the external editor will be used for editing articles. Here you can configure the behaviour of the spell checker. If this is checked a known word-root with an unknown affix will be automatically accepted as a new word. Here you can toggle if two known words that run together to form an unknown word should be treated as an error or not.) Here you chose the dictionary the spell-checker should use. Here you can tell &knode; which encoding should be used for spell checking; for English text this should normally be US-ASCII. Here you can switch between the spell-checkers; you can use International Ispell or Aspell. Here you can configure &knode; for signing articles with GnuPG or PGP. Your GnuPG/PGP ID will be built automatically from your configured name and email address; it is identical to the from line in the header of the article. Here you can choose your encryption tool. If this option is active you only need to type the passphrase for your private key once; &knode; will remember your passphrase until you close &knode; again. If this option is activated &knode; will show the signed message in an extra window for confirmation before changing it in the editor. If you are using public newsgroups (on Usenet) you can safely ignore this option as it would not be useful to encrypt messages sent to Usenet; this option may, however, be useful in private newsgroups on private networks where encryption is desired. If this is marked, the PGP signature of the article is automatically checked when showing the article; if there's no mark, you can check the signature for correctness manually with the ViewVerify PGP-Signature menu entry. The dialogue below shows the settings for the article cleanup; these settings are used to keep the number of articles on your local harddisk to a reasonable number. &knode; administrates the articles in memory so there can be some decrease in speed if you have to many articles lying around; most of the time it makes no sense to keep articles for a very long time. Services like Google and Altavista make archiving unnecessary. &knode; isn't an offline reader, so all of the configuration refers to the headers which are managed by &knode;; if you are running a local news server, such as leafnode, you should refer to its documentation to handle expiring the articles on the server — &knode; cannot do this for you. The cleanup settings The cleanup settings The cleanup settings When this option is active all subscribed groups are checked for old articles in the time interval set here; the old articles will then be deleted. You can force this check by selecting GroupExpire group Here you can configure how often subscribed groups should be checked for old articles and how often those articles should be deleted; this option only has an effect when Expire old articles automatically is selected. Read articles are deleted by the next cleanup if they are older than this value; &knode; uses the creation date for this. Unread articles are deleted by the next cleanup if they are older than this value; &knode; uses the creation date for this. It may happen that you'll see a header in &knode; but the article is not available on the server; if this option is set, those articles will automatically deleted in &knode;. This selection forces a thread to be deleted only if all articles contained in it fulfil the delete conditions; this means that a thread will not be deleted until the last article in the thread should be deleted. This prevents old articles in a long thread from vanishing before the discussion has ended. &knode; can not predict whether there will be a reply after the set conditions are fulfilled; you will have to find your own settings for this. Some newsgroups have days between replies; others only hours. Use your own judgement. This option refers to the memory behaviour of &knode;. If an article in a folder is deleted it will be marked as deleted but still take up space on your hard disk; with this option you can tell &knode; to actually delete the articles and free the hard-disk space regularly. You can force this check by selecting FolderCompact folder or for all folders together with FolderCompact all folders. Here you can configure how often the folder is checked for deleted articles; this option only has an effect if the Compact folders automatically is set.