Thoth 1.8.3 review

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Thoth is usenet newsreader, available as a PowerPC binary for Mac OS X 10.

License: Shareware
OS: Mac OS X
File size: 2169K
Developer: Thoth Software
Price: $0.00
Updated: 09 Jan 2007
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Thoth is usenet newsreader, available as a PowerPC binary for Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later, localized for both English and French languages.

It is intended for downloading only by existing Thoth users with valid registrations previously purchased from Kagi.

Limitations:
Thoth expires 30 days from when it was first installed if it has not been registered.
There's also a limit of 50 queued transfers or inline attachments displayed per session until Thoth has been registered.
Alerts reminding you that Thoth is shareware will be shown at startup until the program has been registered and you have entered your registration key.

What's New:
Changed how the Extract Binaries Manually command works if the only selected item in the article list window is an unexpanded thread for a multi-part post. Previously, if you wanted to select all the parts of such a post, you had to expand the thread, select all the articles in it, then choose Extract Binaries Manually. Now, if the only selected item in the article list window is an unexpanded thread for a multi-part post, the Extract Binaries Manually command will automatically select all the articles in the thread. If the thread is expanded this will not happen, and it won't happen if there's more than one article selected in the article list window. To perform an Extract Binaries Manually command on just the first article in a thread, or selected articles in a thread, simply expand the thread, select the article or articles you want, then choose Extract Binaries Manually.
Fixed a problem with the "Article Range to Fetch" dialog and the version of the "Search for Articles" dialog that takes an article number range that limited article numbers to 8 digits instead of the proper 10 digits.
Fixed a problem with the Search command. After the unread list for the matching articles had been created, a check for new articles was automatically done. Normally this caused little harm, and might just add to the unread list a few newly arrived articles which probably would not match the search criterion. However, in the case of the version of the search command that takes an article number range, all articles higher than the top search article number would be added to the range of supposedly matching articles. This would defeat the whole purpose of this version of the search command by adding a large number of later, non-matching and non-wanted posts, potentially making it impossible to actually view the lower article number posts that did match the Search command. Also disabled the "Check for New Articles" command for search group windows, also to eliminate the possibility of contaminating the search results by adding any newly arrived articles to the unread list for any of the searched groups.
Fixed a problem with doing searches on news servers that don't support XPAT but are configured (in news server settings) with XPAT searching enabled. In such cases Thoth would try to do an XPAT search, and if the server returned an error signaling that XPAT wasn't supported it would instead fetch the relevant range of headers and do its own searching. However Thoth was looking for a 500 error code and some servers return 501 instead, which meant that the fallback manual search wasn't done. Note that if a news server doesn't support XPAT, you're probably much better off opening the group from the full newsgroup list, either option-clicking to Get the "Maximum Number to Fetch" dialog, or shift-clicking to get the "Article Range to Fetch" dialog and then using Thoth's live filtering to search for the posts you want. This will be faster, will let you do better searches, and will let you do multiple searches without having to keep re-fetching headers.
Updated the Thoth User Guide to give tips on searching for posts.
Eliminated the automatic retrying of failed downloads that was added in Thoth 1.8.0. This feature was really only useful with flakey news servers, and unfortunately with some marginal news servers the automatic retries caused even more failed downloads. Since this feature (and the similar one to retry failed header and article fetches) could not be turned on or off via a news server preferences, it was safest to eliminate all the automatic retries. Note that it's possible to use a script to automatically retry failed downloads: "Part Sixteen: Scripting" in the Thoth User Guide (available from Thoth's Help menu) gives a sample script.

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