6.13. News, or conferences

The conference is a collection of text messages, articles of its subscribers. Placing an article in a conference is called publishing.

To work with news, use either Outlook Express or MS Outlook. Action programs with conferences provide:

• an indication of the many conferences in which the computer user plans to participate. This operation is called a subscription, and many of the conferences to which you subscribed are called a subscription list. It is possible to make changes to any subscription list;

• view the authors' names and titles (topics) of articles in each specific conference from the subscription list;

• familiarization with the content of articles and saving them in a file in some predetermined directory of the user's computer;

• publish your own article in a specific conference;

• an individual response to the author of any of the articles on his E-mail address;

• a collective response to the author of a particular article, appearing as a conference article.

To work with conferences, the following parameters apply:

1) DNS-server name of the provider on which the conference articles are stored. This server is called NNTP, and its name must be specified in the contract with the provider;

2) user name for identifying the author when viewing article titles;

3) E-mail address of the user in order to enable personal addressing of the response to the article.

To work with conferences, the software provides three types of windows:

1) conference subscription window;

2) a viewing window in which the titles and contents of conference articles are marked;

3) a window for creating articles. In this window, a public response to the article.

Each of the windows can be called up by the corresponding *** menu or by clicking the tool button.

In the subscription window, you can display either a complete list of all conference groups supported by the NNTP server, or just a list of conferences to which you subscribed. In each of the lists, you can display a subset of conferences that have a name that contains a given combination of characters. To add a conference to the subscription list, double-click the conference name; To exclude conferences from the list, you must also double-click on its name in the list of subscriptions.

The preview window appears when the Outlok Express program is called, and other windows are called from it. This window contains:

• a drop-down list with lists of conference names from the subscription list, as well as Outboxes, Inboxes, Sent, Deleted folders;

• a heading field that lists the articles contained in the conference or folder selected in the previous paragraph. Only source articles can be listed. It is possible to exclude from the list of articles that have already been read;

• a content field in which the main content of the article is displayed on the headline. The article often includes attached files.

The article can be sent to the conference, and a copy - by e-mail to any addressee.

The article creation window should be opened when creating a new article, public or private response to the author. Working with this window is similar to creating and sending e-mail. The article can be created in any of the formats: HTML, Uuencode, MIME. If the message is sent in HTML format, it will be displayed when reading in the same format; otherwise, the message will be displayed as plain text with an HTML file attachment. The recipient will be able to view the attached file with full formatting in any WWW-page viewer.