Modern Usenet newsgroups often contain millions of posts. Having such huge numbers of files listed in your newsgroup reader software can be not only cumbersome, but a downright problem. It will take a long time to load them, it will use up a lot of your RAM, and it will take a while to sort them. And who has time to scroll through a million files anyway, right?
So, to manage this situation, ezGroups has a “files limit” setting. Let’s say that you are only interested in new files, so you set it to a low number like 1,000. ezGroups will then scan the newsgroup’s 1,000 most-recent files and load them into the list on the main window.
ezGroups will then monitor the newsgroup for newly-posted files, and add them to the list. So, while your limit is set at 1,000, you can go over that as new files come in. However, the next time you restart ezGroups, it will only load in the 1,000 most-recent files. You won’t be able to see the oldest files, but they will remain in the database until they expire off of the server. If you want to see them, or delete them, you can raise the limit and then reload the newsgroup,.
In general, it’s a good idea to use the “Clear Files” button on the main window to delete older files from the database once you decide that you will not download them. The files will remain on your Usenet server, of course, so if you later change your mind, you could rescan the newsgroup and then download them.
You can tell if you need to clear-out old files if you see ezGroups slowing down as it loads, scans, and sorts a newsgroup.
ezGroups is designed for the casual user. However, if you want to scan the very high-volume newsgroups, such as the multimedia groups, you should use our unPoster Usenet client program which is designed for exactly that.
The “Files Limit” feature was introduced in ezGroups v5.0.0.