If You Have a Problem

First you should thoroughly check this manual to see if the answer you want is here somewhere. In particular have a look at Known Limitations and Planned Features. What you want to do might simply be impossible at this point in time.

If your problem involves trouble communicating with your news server in some way -- if you can't connect, can't post messages, get an error when you try to download, or whatever -- you'd be wise to investigate the NNTP Logging help topic. It explains how you can get Pineapple News to write the entire conversation it had with the news server to a text file for examination. If you're fairly technical that might be enough information to solve your problem. If not then before asking for help you should have a copy of the log to show to me or someone else who might be able to use it to tell you what's wrong.

If you want to request a feature, talk to other Pineapple News users, ask questions, report a bug, give feedback, or whatever, I suggest that you go to the newsgroup alt.internet.talk.haven. It was abandoned by its original owners many years ago but it still has very good propogation (meaning that it exists on most of the world's news servers). So I have, um ... "re-purposed" it as the location for Pineapple News users to gather and talk. Programmers who have written other newsreaders for BeOS and the people who use those newsreaders are also welcome. We are all more or less in the same boat.

If you can't access that newsgroup then your second choice should be the comp.sys.be.* newsgroups, particularly comp.sys.be.help and comp.sys.be.misc. I read most messages in those groups and I'll probably see your question or comment. If I don't somebody else there is likely to know the answer to most questions.

You can also e-mail me directly. This is a good method for feedback but not such a hot choice for asking questions, at least not during the beta period. If you e-mail me a question whose answer can be found in this manual I'll probably ignore you. I am hot-headed by nature so don't aggravate the situation by making me answer the same questions over and over again.

Finally I've also added some sections below that cover situations that caused my early beta testers grief and what it took to work around or solve them. Hopefully I'll be able to add more sections like this as I get more feedback.


Installing a newer version over an older one

This is fairly painless, and is covered in the Installation help topic.


Why does the program have an expiration date?

This is turning into a FAQ, so here's the answer. I did it that way for several reasons. (You can check the date that the program expires by looking at the About box, accessible from the Help menu.)

The first reason is that this is a big program, almost guaranteed to have bugs, and I wanted a way to ensure that older, buggy versions stop being used at some point. A bug in a newsreader could have consequences not just for the person using it but for everybody on USENET, so it's important to extinguish newsreader bugs in a timely fashion and to use the latest conventions for character sets, headers, attachments, and so on.

Second, I don't have to get into bad situations with people who report bugs, having to resort to conversations like "Are you sure you're using the latest one? Because I think I fixed that recently ..." This way I know what version they are using.

Third, the expiry dates keep me focused on continually improving the program. I have always released a new version at least a few days before the previous one expires (except for one notable occasion where I screwed up for a day or two), so you won't be left without a newsreader in the interim. And with the exception of the release I made the month I was busy moving from Florida to California all versions have included new features.

So rather than seeing the expiration date as a bad thing you should view it as your friend. It means that on or before the date shown you'll have a new version of Pineapple News with more features.


Trouble posting articles

Testing has turned up two scenarios that are likely to explain problems with posting articles. But first, a warning: If you can't post an article delete it from the outbox! Even if you subsequently get everything set up right, articles that are already in the outbox that were rejected on the first try will STILL be broken, so they will definitely fail on the second try also.

Invalid timezone setting   Some news servers won't let you post if your timezone is not set properly. The most common error looks similar to this: 421 Couldn't parse date format. If you get this run the Time preferences app from the Be Menu, click on the Time Zone tab, and set it appropriately.

Network settings are incorrect   Pineapple News needs to be able to create the fully-qualified domain name for your computer to use as part of message IDs it generates. (Every news article must have a unique message ID to distinguish it from every other article ever posted.) This is made up of two parts: the computer name and the domain name pasted together with a period between. If the program can't determine your computer's name it will use the string unknown instead. If it can't determine your domain it will use the string unknown.dom. Therefore if it can't get either part the fully-qualified name it creates will be unknown.unknown.dom. Some news servers let you get away with using a fake name like this, some don't. If yours doesn't you will likely get an error message during posting similar to this: 441 Bad Message-ID.

Therefore you might have to fill out the data in the Network preferences app correctly. Let's say your fully-qualified computer name is sam.tingling.net. In the Identity tab of the Network preferences app you should put "sam" in the "Host name" field and "tingling.net" in the "Domain name" field. If you don't know the fully-qualified name of your computer or it does not have one you can probably get away with making up something for both fields so long as they look vaguely correct. Let's say you're a dial-up customer with an ISP called "Bilge." You could put "bilge.net" for Domain name and "tilly" or any other nonsense word for Host name. Hit the Restart Networking button to commit the changes and try again.


I'm tired of seeing the transfer window pop up by itself

On the Transfer menu there is a sub-menu called Window which has a selection called "Auto display." By default it is checked. Select it to un-check it and the transfer window will not bring itself up ever again. If you need to see it temporarily you can select "Show" from the same menu.


The program crashes

I am very committed to fixing all crash scenarios for which I can get adequate information. If you can get me that information and I can duplicate the crash, I will fix the program, guaranteed. You're going to have to work with me, though. You can't just say "the program crashed," I must have enough information to see the problem for myself. You'll have to describe EXACTLY what you were doing, what buttons you pressed, what you were trying to accomplish, how far along you were in the process, what error messages you saw, and so on.

You must provide me with a "stack crawl," which in BeOS is easy to get. When BeOS puts up a window saying it has to terminate a program one of the buttons is labeled "Details." Select that one, which will get you a new window with three more buttons. Press the one that says "Debugger," which will get you a special terminal window. In the window type "sc" (without the quotes) and Enter. That will spew a bunch of information into the terminal window. From the Edit menu of the terminal window pick Select All, then Copy, which will put all the stack crawl text onto the clipboard. You can type "exit" into the terminal window to make it go away. Now you're ready to paste the stack crawl text into an e-mail, along with the description of what you were doing, and send it to me.


Removing executing action removes ALL actions

In some situations that is unavoidable. There's a tab on the transfer window that allows you to remove executing actions, and if you remove the currently executing one it will take out all other actions destined for that server along with it. That's because trying to recover the state of the conversation with the news server is too tricky, I just tear down the whole connection instead. If you want to remove an action you should do it before it starts executing.


Reading articles from disk to get to the unread ones takes a long time

Unfortunately this is a side-effect of my design decision to store each article in its own message file. I am investigating ways to make it faster but in the meantime there are some workarounds.

Increase the size of your disk cache   Disk operations can be speeded up considerably by increasing the size of your disk cache if you have enough extra memory (say, at least 96MB). To change the disk cache size you must create (or edit) a text file with the following full path name:

/boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/kernel

and add a line like this:

disk_cache_size 32768

which would increase your disk cache size to 32MB. If you don't have at least 128MB of memory then you should probably pick a lower number, like 16384 for 16MB.

Make Pineapple News delete old message files quickly   There is a setting in PineappleNews.ini called DaysToKeepMessages. It defaults to 10, meaning that any messages that were originally downloaded 10 days ago or longer will be killed automatically by the program. (This does not apply to messages you save in storage folders, which are immune.) Setting this value to a smaller number means that you'll have fewer articles, therefore reading all files in individual newsgroups will be faster.

Delete old articles manually   If you're reading a newsgroup and decide you don't want to read any of the remaining articles and never will, pull down the Message menu, select Delete, then All Messages. The program will begin the process of deleting all message files in the current newsgroup or storage folder. This might take a long time but you don't have to wait for it, as soon as the process has started you can switch to a different newsgroup.

Delete each article as you read it   A simple press of the Delete key will delete the message file that is currently displayed in the headers view. Use your imagination.


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