BNR Frequently Asked Questions

General questions

Question: Why is BNR free? Will you turn it into a commercial product at some point?

Answer: BNR is free because it is my freetime hobby project. I code BNR mainly for my own use, but decided to have it publicly available as others may have a need for this kind of a program. I believe that whenever you start getting money for something, it stops being a hobby (read: fun) and becomes a job (read: boring). Thus, I have no plans to turn BNR into a commercial product. If I did that I would also need to actually (gasp!) support it, and stuff...

BNR2 specific questions

Question: Why are the servers not refreshing headers when I open the newsgroup, like in BNR1?

Answer: The newsgroup refresh system has been changed completely between BNR1 and BNR2. In BNR2, you can open a newsgroup (article list) window whenever you want, and you can refresh the headers whenever you want (and also automatically), but there is no connection between these two operations. Thus, make sure you have refreshed the headers for a newsgroup before you open it, if you want to see the headers for this newsgroup.

BNR1 specific questions

Question: Will BNR1 support yEncode? If so, when?

Answer: Sorry, I have no plans to upgrade BNR1 any more, thus I do not plan to add yEncode support into it. I strongly recommend you upgrade to BNR2, as it has yEncode support along with a lot of other improvements. BNR2 still misses a few of the features of BNR1, but I will be adding these during the spring 2002.

Question: How can I get BNR to show multi-part files on a single row?

Answer: Make sure you have Show "Part" column checked in Group Setup / Settings. Then open the newsgroup and from the View menu select Filters... and Show multipart articles on a single row.

Question: I keep getting "Out Of Memory" errors. How can I avoid those?

Answer: BNR uses quite a lot of memory when you use several servers and have several newsgroups open. There are some ways to decrease memory consumption:

Upgrade to version 1.1.1 or above if you are using a prior version. BNR v1.1.1 will use memory more effectively.
Disable Show "From" column from Group Setup / Settings. If this setting is disabled the author names are not shown, downloaded nor kept in memory.
Do not open many newsgroups at the same time. With versions 1.1.1 and above you can further decrease memory consumption by opening one newsgroup, letting all the headers get downloaded (so it gets ungreyed), and only after this open the next newsgroup.
Do not use a huge number of news servers, and delete all non-used servers.
You can try adjusting the virtual memory settings of Windows.
Upgrade your computer with more memory!