Reverse order not possible yet
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Forum: Instructions for Reading Messages
Re:
Reverse Message Order
Date: 1996, May 03
From: Daniel LaLiberte <liberte@hypernews.org>
A HyperNews "forum" or "base article" looks like a normal web page except for a few additional things. There may be several "messages" appended to the end and there are buttons to add a new message, change the display, etc. A "reply" is just another name for a message that has been added in reply to some other message. In HyperNews, a reply can be added to any specific message rather than only to the end of a discussion. Discussions of this form are also called "threads" and the collection of messages are called a "tree".
At the top of each message are several header lines describing the message: the title of the message, the name of the forum, the message it is a reply to (if not at the top level), the message that is a reply to, etc up to the top level, the date it was posted, and who wrote it. It looks like this:
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By the way, reversing the order is possible now. It is a configuration option that is visible to all users and applies to all forums at a site. But I urge you to instead consider subscribing so you can read new messages in your mail box in whatever order you prefer.
Otherwise, new messages are always added after the old messages
on the same level, so they may be read in the natural order. This means
that a top level message will be added at the very end, after all the
current messages replying to the base article and their sub-replies.
The newest of the new messages have a 
icon of some kind to draw your attention.
Reading is usually open to the public - that's what people like about the web. However, reading can be closed to members-only for particular sites, in which case you will have to become a member first, and you may have to talk with the administrator of the site for that.
The tree of messages at the end of a HyperNews page are displayed in an outline which shows, by indentation, which messages are replies to which other messages. Only the titles, authors, and dates are shown for each message in the outline. If the replies go deeper than the outline depth (the default is 3), you will see a "..." where there would be more. You can click on one of the messages in the outline to see that message, and its message outline may then reveal some additional replies.
An abbreviation is used in the outline for the special case of a chain of replies - a single reply to a single reply, etc. Instead of indenting deeper and deeper, subsequent replies are displayed at the same level prefixed by the weird notation: "(_". Here is how that looks:
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You can change how deeply nested the outline is by selecting one of
the controls after "Outline" on the "Messages" header line. You
can select the depth of the outline by clicking on the 
, 
, or 
control.
The 
control displays all levels.
Instead of viewing the tree of messages in an outline and
selecting each one you want to display, you can embed the messages
inline by selecting one of the controls after "Inline"
(this was called "Embed" in older versions). The bodies of inlined
messages will be displayed sequentially in "digest" form after the
message or base article they are in reply to. The 
control
will turn off inlining (the default). The 
control
will inline just one level of replies; there may be non-inlined
replies to some of these replies which will be displayed in the usual
outline form. The 
control will inline all of the messages, leaving
no outline. The title of each inlined message is a link to a page
with only that message on it, so you can go there to reply to it or do
other things with it.
You can use one of several navigation buttons to simplify reading of neighboring messages. These controls are only available when reading messages within a forum, not at the level of the base article.
Next Message
Previous Message
Out (or Next Thread)
More (or Next-in-Thread)
If you are using a browser that can display frames (such as
Netscape 2.0), you can try using HyperNews with frames by clicking on
the "Frames" button 
on the bottom of the
page. If you don't like it, you can turn it off by clicking on "No
Frames" 
. With
frames turned on, three frames
will be displayed: a "base frame" in the upper left, an "outline
frame" in the upper right, and a "message frame" in the bottom half.
Clicking on a message in the outline will display it in the message
frame.
So far, this should be obvious. What is not so obvious is that you can
display any message in the base frame by clicking on the "New
Base" button 
on the bottom of the message frame. This will move
the message currently in the message frame into the base frame, leaving
the message frame empty again, and the outline frame will show only
replies to that message. Clicking on most other links in pages
displayed within HyperNews frames should bring up a new window. (This is
partly so that the frame history is not lost.)
