Priority Levels
BNR supports several priority levels that can be set for marked articles. With the priority levels you can control in which order the marked articles get downloaded. You can, for example, set a higher priority level to index files or articles that contain descriptions of big multipart files to download these first.
You can change the priority level for selected articles either before or after you mark the articles for download. Article priority level is a separarate property and is not directly linked to the "marked for download" flag. Note that priority levels get reset to normal if you save marked articles to cache (since the priority level setting is not saved).
The priority levels can be changed using the Right-Click menu, or more easily by using keys "3", "2", "1", "0" and "-" within the Article List to set a new priority level to the currently selected article(s).
The priority levels are:
This is the highest priority level, sort of "Get me this article NOW!". As soon as any server (that has this article) finishes with the article it is currently downloading (or gets the current group headers downloaded) it will switch to this newsgroup and start downloading this article. Do not overuse this level, as it can easily cause unnecessary jumping between newsgroups.
This is the level that is used by BNR when a group needs it's new headers to be downloaded from the servers. If you set this priority level to some marked articles in the current group, they will get downloaded before the server begins to download new headers for some other open newsgroup.
This is a good priority level for index files and such. BNR will download articles marked with this priority level first, unless there are newsgroups that need their headers downloaded or you have set even higher priority levels to some other articles.
This is the normal priority level. Unless you specifically change the priority level all articles are set to this level.
If you set this level to some marked articles, they will be downloaded last, after all the other articles have been downloaded in all the other open newsgroups. This is a sort of "If there is nothing better to do, download these" level.
The order in which the articles are downloaded within the same priority level depends on the order the articles would get expired on the servers (first to expire gets downloaded first). BNR will also attempt to download articles that only exist on a single server first before downloading articles that exist on multiple servers.
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