Configuration Form / Server Setup / Advanced

On the "Advanced" tab of the server setup you can configure some additional options for the server. These are:

Preference

With the server preference setting you can control which articles will be downloaded from this server. If an article exists on a higher-preference server, BNR will not download it from a lower-preference server. Thus, if a server preference is "Low", it will only download articles that exist only on this server. If the server preference is "High", all articles that exist on this server will be downloaded from this server (and no other server, even if the other server is free and this server is busy). Among servers with the same preference level BNR uses the fastest server when determining which server to use for download of which article.

Auto-retry connection every X seconds if busy

If the server is often busy (responds with "Too many active connections" or some such immediately after connection is established), you can check this checkbox to have BNR attempt to reconnect until the connection succeeds (or you press the disconnect button). The number gives the time interval how frequently a reconnect is attempted.

Download articles by MessageID (instead of article#)

Normally BNR uses the article number to download articles. If this causes problems (the server reassigns article numbers between sessions, for example), you can check this box to make BNR use the unique message-ID to download articles. This is slower both within BNR and on the server end, so do not check this box unless you have problems with vanishing article headers or incomplete downloads.

Skip cached headers availability check

Normally BNR checks whether all the cached headers are still available and whether there are new articles in the article number area that was cached when you open a newsgroup and connect to the server. However, if you use BNR often, you have a slow connection, and the server keeps articles for a long period of time this will cause a long delay before the articles get visible. If you wish to see new articles sooner and do not mind possibly missing some new articles you can turn on this setting.

Minimize amount of header download data

This setting forces BNR to download only the headers it needs from this server and not to combine blocks of headers that are needed but which have some unneeded headers in between. For example, if BNR needs to download headers 100-105 and 110-120, with this setting turned on BNR will download exactly those headers, with the setting turned off BNR will download headers 100-120. The latter will usually greatly reduce the total time spent downloading headers. You should only turn this setting on if minimizing the number of bytes downloaded is much more important to you than minimizing the time spent downloading headers.

Max number of headers to store

With this setting you can select the maximum number of new headers BNR will download (and store into the newsgroup header list and cache file) from this server. The default is 250.000. If you have a slow server with a very large amount of headers in the newsgroups you visit daily, you may want to lower this number so BNR does not spend so much time downloading headers (especially if you don't have "Skip cached headers availability check" turned on). You may also want to lower this amount if you have very little memory (64MB, for example) on your PC. On the other hand, if you have a very fast server that has more than 250.000 headers for a group and you wish to see all the headers, you can increase this amount.