NewsBin Pro 3.3
Options
Options
There are 8 tabs that display
NewsBin's different configuration options. Setup, Switches, Dialup,
Firewall, File Descriptions, Logs, Thumbnails, and Advanced. Click
on the screenshot below for help for each option.
Setup:
The setup tab on the options screen allows you to set the following
configuration items:
Download Path:
This is the directory where NewsBin will store your downloaded
files. An option on the "Switches" tab allows you to
specify whether you want all your files to be saved in this directory or
to create subdirectories using the name of the newsgroup as the directory
name.
Connections:
Specifies how many simultaneous connections NewsBin should use when
downloading binaries. Many news servers have connection limits so
you can set this up to your news server limit - 1 connection that NewsBin
uses for downloading headers. This is the same setting as the
connections spinner on the main screen.
Max Retries:
Specifies the maximum number of times NewsBin will retry downloading a
post before it gives up and moves on to the next. A setting of 0
tells NewsBin to retry forever. Version 3.3 does not accept a retry
limit less than 5 (except 0).
Max Record
Age: Specifies how long NewsBin should store downloaded
headers ("Records" and "Headers" are used synonymously
here). The headers are stored in the in a directory called
"Records" under the directory where NewsBin is installed.
The age specified tells NewsBin how many days to hold records on
disk. When you download headers from a newsgroup, NewsBin first
loads up the headers saved on disk and then downloads any new records
available. Records saved on disk are trimmed upon startup.
First Time Records:
This is a very important and tricky setting. It is used by NewsBin
only when you access a newsgroup for the first time. After that,
NewsBin only downloads new recoreds. The value of this setting
depends on the type of newsgroups you typically access. If you
access picture groups with mostly single-part posts, the default value of
1000 will give you a good start. If you access multimedia groups
with mostly multi-part posts, you should set it to at least 10000 or
more. If you want to blindly download every header to the full
retention of the news server, set it to one million (1000000). Keep
in mind that NewsBin saves all header information in RAM (a performance
tradeoff, RAM is cheap these days) so if you download headers from several
multimedia groups and use several news server simultaneously, you better
have at least 256MB or RAM.
If you change this setting and want
to re-download headers from a specific group, you must right-click on the
group from the Group Window and select "Purge Records (Catch
Up)" to make use of the new setting.
Post
Limiter: Enabling the Post Limiter option tells NewsBin to
only download the number of records specified in the "Maximum
Posts" field. If used in conjunction with the "Recycle
Servers" option on the "Switches" tab, NewsBin will walk
through each group, X posts at a time (X being the number of records
specified in the "Maximum Posts" field), and then pick up where
it left off after it cycles through all selected newsgroups. This
only works in "Automatic Mode".
Default
Settings: If you mess up your settings, this button returns
the settings to NewsBin defaults which includes setting the download path
to be the "Download" directory placed in the directory where
NewsBin is installed, Connections = 2, Max Retries = 10, Max Record Age =
3, First Time Records = 1000 (good for picture groups), and the Post
Limiter is disabled.
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