Turnpike Newsgroup

When you install Turnpike and use Connect for the first time, you will need to wait until all the newsgroups have finished downloading or the program will try again the next time you use Connect.

Click on the newsstands icon if you have version 3, 4 or 5 of Turnpike. For version 6 you will need to click on the word Newsstands in the Explorer.

Once the newsgroups are downloaded, you can then read these articles off-line.

Subscribing to newsgroups
If you have not subscribed to any newsgroups, please click on the Help button on the toolbar in Turnpike to find out how to do this.

Each time you go online, Turnpike Explorer will download the latest articles posted to the newsgroup you are subscribed to.

The name of a newsgroup describes the type of information it discusses. These names consist of two or more parts separated by dots and indicate the hierarchy to which the newsgroup belongs. For example, rec.pets.dogs is a newsgroup in a part of the recreational hierarchy that deals with particular types of pets.

Alt Newsgroups
Newsgroups containing the word 'binaries' include data that is not just text, particularly pictures. These can take a long time to download and can quickly fill your disk space. Turnpike includes various facilities for filtering news in order to help with this problem. Newsgroups with 'Alt' as the first part of their name are described as Alternative Newsgroups.

These groups usually developed out of newsgroups that were originally circulated among people working at the same site. They tend to be less formal and their contributions more eccentric than the newsgroups within the main newsgroup categories.

A number of Alternative newsgroups have names that include the word Binary or Binaries. The articles themselves are usually referred to as Binaries.

Browsing Newsgroups
If you only have a passing interest in a newsgroup or the articles in the newsgroup are very large, set the Browse option in the Newsgroup subscriptions dialog. This will cause only the headers of these articles to be copied to your disk. This will save both valuable connect time and disk space, while still allowing you to see whether there is anything of interest to you. If you see an article you do want to read, you are able to request it to be downloaded the next time you go on-line.

For a newsgroup that has been set to browse, you can request the article to be downloaded in full. You can also set kill rules that will download specified articles in full.

Note

You may find occasionally that a newsgroup you browse includes an article that's been downloaded in full. Equally, you may find that you only have the header of an article in a newsgroup you download in full. The full article in a browse group will simply be an article that has been cross-posted to a newsgroup you take in full.

Where you just have a header in a newsgroup that you take in full, this will either be an article that has been killed, or it will the result of an aborted download.

For more detailed information on using newsgroups, please see the Help files.