"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:

No, it's how a lot of people do it (and a feature of many news
clients). You _may_ have highlighted a reason not to do it
with _some_ news servers.

I still think that polling for new usenet posts makes no sense.

Your mail client polls for new email but it does so while it's tucked
away in the background, and (usually) only announces new mail with an
indicator icon in the system try. It's useful to know when you have new
mail because (unless it's spam) it's directed at you, it pertains to
you, it might be important to you, etc. The person sending the mail
benefits when there is a short time-delay in getting a reply from you,
and hence frequent polling cuts down the time-delay in email
conversations.

Unless you are having an active discussion on usenet, almost none of the
above reasons apply to polling for new usenet messages. And even when
you are having an active discussion, simply clicking off and then back
on the group will cause your reader to refresh the group message list,
and you can keep up with new messages "in real time" - certainly faster
than a polling method with settings in terms of minutes.

messages is printed beside each group. At this point, Communicator
doesn't actually go out and get any message headers for any groups.

(Do you mean it doesn't get message _bodies_? Surely in order to check
"the current message-count" it needs headers. Or are you going on some
sort of serial number that the server puts on each message?)

Communicator (and most purpose-built usenet clients I would imagine)
know how many new posts in any given newsgroup are sitting on a server
*without* having to download any of the messages or even the message
headers.

In fact, Communicator has a setting for the max number of new message
headers to download. In other words, if I subscribe to a new group (or
visit an active group infrequently) there may be hundreds or thousands
of posts sitting on the server that are "new" (new for me anyways) even
if they are days, weeks or months old. I can tell Communictor that my
limit is 500 posts, and when I open a group that has more than 500 "new"
posts, it will only download the message headers for the most-recent 500
posts, and mark the remaining ones as "read" (red).

I click on any given post in the top pane, and the post is
displayed in the lower pane. It's a lot like reading e-mail.

(Obviously at some point your news client has downloaded the bodies
of the posts as well as the headers - or maybe it's doing so as you
get to them.)

It downloads the headers immediately when I click on a group in the left
pane - up to the limit that I mentioned above. It displays the
message-subject, sender, time/date stamp for each post, 1 per line, in
the top pane of the right side. The entire history of all posts
(subject, sender, date/time) seems to be cached indefinately. There are
some groups that I can go back and see the subjects, sender, date/time
going back to 2008. But if I click on any of those old posts (to
display them in the lower pane) I'm told the post is no longer on the
server, at which point I can elect to remove all posts that are no
longer on the server from this cache. AIOE caches posts for something
like 40 or 60 days.

What you describe is fairly normal for newsreaders, too. (_I_
used to use Netscape for news too, at work, many years ago; from
what I remember it was a good news client.)

I couldn't imaging using anything else for reading/posting to usenet.

If I click to a new group, all posts in the current group are
treated as "old" even if I haven't viewed all of the new posts.

That would drive me nuts, but each to his own. It might even be
an optional setting.)

I'm wrong about that. It's not the number of "new" messages that is
displayed along side each group in the left pane - it's the number of
unread messages. If I leave a group without reading all the new
messages, the count of unread messages is maintained and added to later
if I go back to that group and it has new messages.

In many groups, if there is a new thread that is started and I'm not
interested in following it, I mark it as "ignore". From that point on,
all posts in that thread won't show up in the message-list in the top
pane.

If I want to leave a group but mark all posts as "read" (red), I
right-click and select "mark group as read".

So, basically, _you_ trigger a fetch of new posts (or at least a new
count), by - in one of at least two ways - going out of and then coming
back in to a 'group.

Yes.

Of course, we're making assumptions about what constitutes a
"session" here; unless someone quotes something unambiguous
from the AIOE Ts and Cs (if it is even clarified there), we
won't know one way or another.

-----------
Each IP address is authorized to post 25 messages per day and the
posting rights are suspended for 24 hours if more than three messages
are rejected in a day. Each post must be sent to less than three groups
(crosspost) and each one can include at most three followup groups.
Maximum allowed size is 32 KB per article and 2 KB per header. Only two
concurrent connections per IP address are allowed and 400 connections
per day are accepted from each IP address.
------------

That's from he

http://www.aioe.org/

There are 1440 minutes in a day. 1440 / 400 = 3.6.

A connection could end, say, a minute after the last packet exchanged
between client/server. In which case, checking for new messages every 3
minutes would put you up against the 400-connection limit at close to
the 24-hour mark, assuming your computer is on 24/7 along with the
usenet client.