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Thoth Changelog

What's new in Thoth 1.9.1.2

Dec 6, 2013
  • Made some changes to better support some non-standards complaint, small, private news servers/mail to news gateways. These servers don't always properly handle fetching articles by Message-ID. Trying to fetch an article via Message-ID for a freshly opened news server connection could result in the server wrongly returning a “412 no newsgroup currently selected” error. This in turn would be reported to the user as a 4024 error. Thoth 1.9.1.2 has a work-around for this server bug.
  • Fixed an ancient bug that would case the Print command for selected articles in an article list window to not work. Some other old printing related bug were also fixed.
  • Ensured that any new groups window shown for the “Rebuild Full Group List” command has the groups properly sorted.

New in Thoth 1.9.1.0 (Nov 16, 2013)

  • It's now possible to use up to 16 connections per news server. In previous versions of Thoth, the status area at the top of the Queued Transfers List window could be set to show up to the current maximum of 6 queued transfer connections. Borrowing from the design developed for Thoth 2, the revised Queued Transfers List window replaces the fixed connection status panes with a scrolling list. This makes it easy to support more connections without making the window too tall. The screenshot below shows that there are now 20 simultaneous queued transfer connections allowed.
  • IMPORTANT! In general, it's still much better and more efficient to use as few connections as possible. Thoth can easily fetch articles at a speed of 3 MBps (24 Mbps) using a single connection. Note that Thoth is conservative in displaying transfer speeds, showing the running average speed in bytes per second and not an instantaneous value in bits per second, with the timer starting when Thoth issues the command to the server. So the displayed speed includes the delay in initially getting a response from the server, and includes the time for disk i/o. Therefore the transfer rate shown by Thoth when downloading small single-part posts will be less than when it's downloading a large multi-part posts, and the average rate will normally increase over time (unless there's a problem with the connection, or rate limiting by your ISP or news provider, or contention for available bandwidth with some other network operation (by Thoth or another application) as the initial delay in getting data from the server becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the total time.
  • Associated with the above change change, there's an associated change in scripting support. The old toggletransferspaused and gettransferspaused have been modified, so that instead of specifying the connection with an enumeration (transferOne through transferSix) the connection is now specified with an integer (1 through 20). This will require any scripts using these custom Thoth events to be edited and recompiled.
  • Previously there was only one thread used for decoding downloaded binary attachments, so as each new queued transfer for a binary attachment was completed, the temp file was added to the decoder queue. It's now possible to use multiple decoder threads. This is configured in the “DecoderInfo.plist” file (when Thoth is not running).
  • Related to this change, decoder errors are now shown in a dedicated “Thoth Decoding Errors” window
  • The Pause/Resume button in the toolbar can be used to pause decoding (it's initially set to paused when an error is being reported and the “Pause Decoding on Errors” checkbox in the “Extracting Binaries” Preferences topic is checked. The error text is cleared and decoding unpaused when the window is closed. The error text can also be cleared using the Edit menu Cut and Clear commands.
  • Marking crossposts read should now be faster (though in general this is still a bad idea as it leads to a fragmented unread list resulting in slower fetching of article headers).
  • In article list windows, the status text above the list now shows the unread count for shown and hidden articles separately.
  • Added the ability to use batched commands when fetching articles for a multi-part binary post. This may make downloading slightly faster and more efficient, as long as no failed commands need to be retried. To enable batched article fetching for multi-part binary posts.
  • Thoth now always fetches articles by Message-ID whenever possible. This makes it possible to change what news server will be used to download articles via the “Queued Transfers List” window. Therefore the “Fetch Articles By Message-ID” checkbox in the “News Server” topic of the “News Server Settings” dialog that was added in 1.9.0.22 has been removed, and the “Download Information” dialog now has a popup menu of open news server to allow a different news server to be selected. As a result of this change, the “Thoth Transfers” file and ”Thoth Outbox” folder in each news server folder are no longer used, and are replaced by a single, unified “Thoth Transfers” file and ”Thoth Outbox” folder in the “Thoth Preferences” folder.
  • When an article list or full group list window is refiltered or otherwise rebuilt, any child windows are no longer closed. They may instead be orphaned. For an article list window opened from the full group list window, the window is considered orphaned if the article list window's group is no longer in the full group list window or the article list window's news server is not the same as the current full group list window news server. Next Group commands are disabled in orphaned article list windows. For article windows, the window is considered orphaned if filtering or removing read articles from the parent article list window results in one or more of the articles in the article's thread are removed from the article list window or if the articles in the thread are reordered. In orphaned article windows only navigation within the current thread is possible from the window (i.e. the Next Group and Next Thread commands are disabled for the window, and the Next/Previous Article commands will stop at the end or beginning of the thread). In all cases navigation will be enabled again if filtering (or changing the current news server in the case of the full group list window) results in the child window no longer being orphaned.
  • Added to the Newsreading topic of Preferences the ability to automatically check for new articles every n minutes in open subscribed group list windows. Note that, like the manual “Check for new Articles” command (command-Y) this will skip any groups that are already open or in the process of being opened.
  • Hitting the tab key when a subscribed group list window is open will now switch to the next (or previous if the shift key is also held down) open subscribed group list window (for any open news server).
  • Fixed a potential race condition when UseRunLoopsForConnections and doing a DNS lookup or opening a server connection that could cause the operation to appear to fail/hang when in fact it had completed almost immediately.
  • Added a work-around for the OS X 10.8 and later bug that Finder aliases to items on disk images are incorrect, and resolve to the disk image file itself rather than the original file or folder in the disk image.
  • Worked around a bug with EasyNews news servers where the server often returns the incorrect status number for ARTCLE commands. This would cause Thoth to report a 4020 error.
  • Fixed a potential crashing bug when doing a Find command or similar in various text-based windows.
  • Fixed a bug in the WASTE text engine used by Thoth.
  • Changed how “Automatic” Binary Parts Rules are determined for cases where all the articles in a thread are labelled as (1/1). This deal with cases where the subject lines look like: my post (6/666)- filename.ext (1/1); my post (7/666) - filename.ext (1/1)
  • i.e. duplicate posts where the post (n/m) or [n/m] indicator changes, but the actual post part number indicator is (1/1) for all the posts in the thread. Previously, or if not all the posts also have a (1/1) indicator, these would be given part numbers of 6 and 7 (of 666 total) respectively.
  • The Intel, 10.5 and later version is now compiled using Xcode 4.6, meaning a completely different compiler and code generator is used, which may result in better performance (or new bugs). This also allows more rigorous testing of the code for correctness and freedom from memory leaks.
  • Added support to prevent idle sleep when Thoth is busy doing queued transfers, etc. This is only available when running 10.6 or later, and is enabled by default when running 10.8 or later (because prior to 10.8 the system would normally not start idle sleep if there were active network connections.
  • Note that Thoth does not prevent the display from sleeping when this is enabled.

New in Thoth 1.9.0.21 (Sep 7, 2012)

  • Thoth no longer fetches additional (or any) headers via the XHDR command, only the XOVER command is used. This means that all header fetching is done in one step, none is done during filtering, and filtering can only be done on XOVER headers. With most news server it hasn't been possible to fetch non-XOVER headers for many years anyway. The Thoth user Guide talks about this, and non-XOVER headers have been segregated in the filter header popup menu for a long time to indicate this fact.
  • The "Thoth Transfers" file in Thoth 1.9.0 is in a newer format than that used by 1.8.x. The change was necessary to support NZB files. Thoth 1.9.0 can read and use older format "Thoth Transfers" files, but when it saved the file it'll be in the new format that can't be read by Thoth 1.8.x. This is only an issue if you have saved items in the Queued Transfers List in Thoth 1.9.0 and you try to use the same news server setup files with Thoth 1.8.x.
  • Thoth 1.9.0 no longer supports the old "Mark Kept" feature. I don't know if anyone ever used this. So the "Thoth Article Cache," "Thoth Header Cache," and "Thoth Parts Cache" files aren't used, and will show as blank icons (Thoth 1.9.0 doesn't include icon or file type support for these files). The files can be deleted if/when you switch to using Thoth 1.9.0 exclusively.
  • Thoth now supports longer usernames/password for servers. This information is stored separately from the old values (and is automatically set when you first run Thoth 1.9.0) So if you change any of this information in Thoth 1.9.0, then try to use the same setting file in Thoth 1.8.x, you'll probably see the old username/password values.
  • When updating to Thoth 1.9.0, any saved, custom article window column widths will be lost.
  • If you add divider items to a subscribed group list, then use the subscribed group list in Thoth 1.8.x, the dividers will be removed, and you'll see the dividers listed as deleted groups not on the news server.
  • Thoth 1.9.0 supports using TLS/SSL for connecting to news servers, older Thoth versions do not, and usually the news server name (address) in “News Server Settings” is different when using SSL. So a news server setup that has been modified to use SSL under Thoth 1.9.0 will probably require modification (resetting the server name in “News Server Settings”) to be used with Thoth 1.8.5 and earlier.

New in Thoth 1.8.5 (Oct 21, 2010)

  • Building article threads and sorting article list windows is now faster (fixed in October 18, 2020 released labeled Version 1.8.5 (20101018-0) in “Get Info” dialog).
  • In some cases network speed per connection may be improved.
  • Updated all documentation to reflect new appgarth.com website, etc.

New in Thoth 1.8.4 (Apr 10, 2008)

  • The main change is a work-around for an issue with Giganews and similar news servers that return a 503 error code when an attempt is made to fetch an unavailable header type via the XHDR command.