Evaluation - continued ......

Show only unread articles: It was suggested that when browsing the articles available within a news group, the option should be available to show only those articles that have not been read by the user. This feature was suggested as one member of the focus group claimed it was hard to distinguish the read articles from the unread ones, even when the unread ones were in bold font. Unfortunately this feature was not implemented as the suggestion was made very late in the project development and time dictated that it could not be included.

Grouping of news groups in sections: The list of available news groups shows the name of the news group along with the number of unread articles and the total number of articles within the group. In order to achieve this the system must contact the configured NNTP server and make multiple queries for each individual news group relating to the number of articles available. If the user is viewing a summary of many, or all, of the news groups available, this process can take considerable time and so a member of the focus group suggested that the news groups be split into sections — ‘local.a’ for all the news groups that begin ‘local.a’, ‘local.b’ for all the news groups that begin ‘local.b’ and so on from a through to z.

While this may prove a useful feature for a minority of people, most of the people that use such systems take advantage of the ability to subscribe to news groups and subscribe to the news groups that they are most interested in. This would, more than likely, be a relatively short list when compared to the list of all available news groups and the system would take a much shorter amount of time to obtain information related to them. Inclusion of this feature would also require that the user navigate extra pages in order to find the news group that they wish to read articles from.

Highlight groups containing unread articles: At present, the information displayed a news group when a list of available news groups is produced is the group name, the number of unread articles within the group and the total number of articles available within the group. A member of the focus group suggested that the news groups which contain unread articles be highlighted in some way in order that the user will find it easier to notice that there are unread articles available in some news groups. It was felt that this feature was not necessary to implement as the news group listing displays the number of unread articles clearly and the inclusion of this feature may cause confusion for the user .

Speed of system
Due to the nature of the system produced — a Web based news reader — it is required that data cannot persist across multiple Web browser page requests. This means that the system must acquire a new connection to the NNTP server every time a page is requested and it must then download all the information it requires to display the requested page. As this is the case the system can be quite slow when displaying the news group list, listing articles within a group or displaying the contents of an article — the latter two slow downs occur as a related to the threading system implemented. The focus group agreed that the system was quite slow for a news reader, although only one member found it particularly slow, while one member only experienced minimal slow down during his testing phase.

Binary posts
An often used feature of Usenet is posting of binary files which allows people to distribute files through the system, unfortunately this feature is abused by many and used to distribute copyrighted material. The format of news articles is such that MIME-like encoding would not be possible as MIME encoding usually requires multiple sections to a message with individual header information for each, which is not allowed. Therefore binary attachments are not attached to messages as would usually be the case, they are posted as individual attachments containing the binary file ‘yEncoded’ which can then be decoded by the client’s news reader and saved into a file.