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Threaded Article View
A threaded article view was included so that users of the
system would find it much easier to follow discussions and
conversations that they are interested in. There is also a
navigation option while reading messages to retrieve the next
or previous article within the current thread. Also included
was the ability to view all the articles in a news group with
a non-threaded listing
News Group Subscription
It is often the case that the user of a news system does not
wish to read the latest articles available in each and every
news group the server offers. As this is the case the system
offers, as do many other news readers, the ability to ‘subscribe’
to a set of news group which the user uses most often. The
user may then opt to simply ignore all news groups that they
are not subscribed to and the system will not show them in
the list of groups available without the user explicitly choosing
for the non-subscribed groups to be shown.
News group ordering
When a user first uses this system they are not subscribed
to any news groups on the NNTP server that they are using,
they must therefore acquire a list of all the available news
groups and subscribe to those that interest them. In order
to make it easier for a first time user to find the news groups
that they wish to subscribe to, it was suggested that a user
should be able to order the news groups alphabetically. This
feature was partially included within the system — when
a new users starts to use the system the list of available
news groups is automatically sorted alphabetically, however
if the user imports their own ‘newsrc’ file then
the news groups listed in the imported file are not sorted
and are left in their default order.
Another ordering suggestion made was that once a user has
performed any subscriptions that they wish to do and want
to read articles within their subscribed groups, they should
be able to order the news groups by the number of unread articles
that are present within the group, the total number of articles
in the group or even the number of read articles within a
group. This feature however, was not implemented.
Multiple style sheets
The decision to include support for multiple cascading style
sheets was very important as it allows the end user to choose
which layout and design they wish to use when viewing the
system which also means that it can be employed to cover various
accessibility issues.
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