"Picture Sucker Pro"

                    An Automated News Download Program

                            by L.P. Glaister


A news group picture collection program has been developed by myself
to automate the collection of uuencoded pictures posted to the various
usenet news groups. The program runs on windows NT (x86) and Windows 95.

*** "Picture Sucker" will not operate correctly on Windows 3.x or 3.11. ***

This is because Picture Sucker is written as a full 32 bit multi-threaded
winsock compliant application. Multithreading is only supported under
Windows 95 and Windows NT.


The program searches a list of user programmable news groups looking
for articles ranging in length of approximately 500 to 8500 lines in length
(most good pictures fall in this range) with the subject line containing the
strings "1/1" or "01/01" ( this avoids downloading partial pictures ). Several
other tests may be optionally applied as a selection criteria for downloads.

This version connects to a user specified news server and uses only low
level news commands that should be supported by any NNTP server.


Getting Started With Picture Sucker Pro and Picture Sucker Freeware:

    1.    unzip the supplied file into any desired directory preferably on a
          hard disk with lots of free space. One overnite download may net
          2000 pictures using about 200mb.  You should have this file
          (help.txt) and pixsuck.exe and boink.wav (a short tick sound).

    2.    dial up your internet service provider via the dialup networking option
          in windows 95 or RAS in Windows NT.

    3.    when connected start pixsuck.exe

    4.    you will get a message warning that no subscribed news groups were
          found... this is normal until you get things setup. Click on OK.
          You will also be warned that no setup file was found, again this is
          all ok during intial installation. Click on OK, this will bring you to
          the setup window.

    5.    Fill in your news server IP address. This should look something like
          news.xyzcorp.com or 122.12.34.2.
          Normally, the rest of the fields default settings will be a good
          starting point. If your news server requires additional user
          authentication, check the "required" box and fill in the username and
          password supplied by your news service provider. Note: dont use this
          unless it is required. If you are using a dialup connection to the internet,
          fill in your username and password required when logging onto the internet.
          These items are the same as you enter when using dialup netwoking.

    6.    Click on OK. This will take you to the main picture sucker window.
          Before you can download pictures, you will have to get a current
          list of news groups from the news server.

    7.    Click on the newsgroups button. This will advise you that you need
          to click on the "refresh list" button. So... doit. This may take a
          while as there are over 30000 news groups on some servers. The
          title bar will give you a blow by blow description of what is
          happening. You should see the left hand window fill up with a list
          of every newsgroup available from your news server.

    8.    After the groups are downloaded, the buttons will become enabled
          once again. Select the groups you wish to search for articles by
          double clicking on the group name in the left hand window, by
          highlighting a group of groups using the ctrl key and mouse clicks
          or by using the shift and arrow keys to select a group of groups.
          Once a group of groups is selected, it may be subscribed to or
          unsubscribed to be clicking on the --> or <-- buttons. The quickest
          way to get started is to just click on the Defaults--> button. This
          will scan the left hand window for groups of interesting subjects
          and will move the groups to the right hand subscribed window. Now
          click on OK. The groups will be stored in the newsrc file... this
          may take a few seconds to complete the write to the hard disk.

    9.    From the main window just click on "start sucking" button. This
          will connect to your news server and display status in the main
          window areas on a regular basis.

    10.   You may exit the program at any time during downloading. Be sure
          to use the Close button, this will insure that all the history
          and setup files are stored properly on the hard drive.

    11.   Now that the program is setup, starting it again just requires
          starting pixsuck.exe and clicking on the Start Sucking button.


The latest FAQ and new release information is available on my web pages:
http://nanaimo.ark.com/~glaister/. The latest online manual describing
Picture Sucker is available on my web site.
Other programs you may be interested in include Web Sucker and Server Sucker.

You may contact me for limited email support at:
glaister@nanaimo.ark.com

Enjoy