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Each article has an article attribute associated with it. This attribute indicates the status of the article (have you seen it? have you read it? etc.). The attribute is shown either by highlighting the article line, or placing a single character following the article id.
In most cases, the initial display of articles has the unread attribute associated with each article. This is indicated by a blank space after the article id. In our example you can see that all of the articles are marked as unread.
When you select an article it will be highlighted (if your terminal cannot do highlighting then it will be marked with `*'). This is the selected attribute. Articles will remain selected if you mark them selected and then leave the newsgroup without reading them.
An article is marked read after you have read it. These articles will be marked permanently read when you leave the newsgroup and will not be displayed the next time you enter the newsgroup. The read attribute is indicated by `.'
One final attribute is the seen attribute. This indicates that an article has been presented but not read. These will be marked read when you leave the newsgroup.
There are several other article attributes, but they are beyond the scope of this document.
This brief introduction to attributes was necessary to understand some of the following selection mode commands:
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