Personally, I don't like to do this, and that's why SBNews doesn't do it by default. The problem is that many new novice users (or even experienced users for that matter...) forget to put the filename on the subject line. Then, you'd miss the file! However, some of you feel differently, and thus I have included the capability as follows:
SBNews will now scan the subject field for an acceptable file mask before the file is downloaded.
Unsolicited, off-topic newsgroup messages, commonly referred to as SPAM, have become quite a problem recently. Many commercial adult sites post unwanted x-rated material to groups without any consideration of whether the material is on-topic or not. Usually, these pictures are plastered with banners advertising the service.
There are several ways to eliminate SPAM with SBNews:
You're not alone -- so are a lot of people. As far as I can tell, AOL does not provide a standard nntp news server. I might be wrong on this, I don't know. If anyone does know for sure, then please send me a note. In the meantime, my best suggestion would be to get a real Internet account in addition to your AOL service.
Use the Configure:Path Expansion option -- that's what it's there for. You have several options available, such as using numbered subdirectories or subdirectories based on a portion of the newsgroup name. Consult the documentation or help file for more information.
[This is the answer to the question.]
There could be several different causes for this problem:
The number one cause of this problem is insufficient disk space. I know, I really need to spiff up the handling of this to give you some informative error messages and have a more graceful shutdown. I will probably be doing this in the future. In the meantime, if you get some Decoding Initialization Failure messages, then the first thing you should do is verify that all of your download drives have plenty of free disk space.
This message is actually given whenever Newsbot cannot create a file. It may be due to some other reason than disk space, although I have never seen any. Possibilities could be writing to a read-only media (i.e. CD-ROM), writing to a network drive you don't have access to, writing to a drive that doesn't exist, overwriting an existing read-only or system file, or some other circumstance that causes Windows to not want to create the file.
Lockout Posting Host has a somewhat technical meaning and is often misunderstood. Lockout Posting Host is intended to refer to a specific news header field called "NNTP-Posting-Host". This field holds the name of the host which the message author posted from. Lockout Posting Host does not refer to the stuff after the @ symbol in a from header.
The reason for Lockout Posting Host is simple... Many undesirable authors will forge the from field in the header to make it more easy to track them down. Locking out part of the from field won't work, since these people generally post under many different made-up names. However, many times the NNTP-Posting-Host field is automatically filled in by their news program and is valid. In these situations, you can use Lockout Posting Host to eliminate all messages from that host.
I've made it my policy to not specifically endorse any newsgroups containing adult subject matter. Therefore, I can't recommend any specific groups for you to try. All of the adult groups are fairly easy to spot; The majority of them are located under the "alt.binaries.pictures.erotic" hierarchy. If you use the <Browse> button located in the <Add> dialog, you should be able to scroll down and find a big block of them. Like I said, their names are fairly obvious so you should be able to spot them without difficulty.
It's possible that your news server might not list these groups in the newsgroup listing -- I've had unconfirmed reports of this. In this case, you will need to learn the newsgroup names from an alternate source and you can just type their names into the <Add> dialog.
One useful hint (not necessarily related solely to adult newsgroups) is to use the Statistics:Similar Newsgroups pull-down menu function. This will provide a listing of groups cross-referenced with the one you're currently receiving. These groups usually contain related subject matter and you may wish to investigate them.