If not, then ask the remote system's news administrator to run upact on a regular basis to update the number in the active file. Also requires that the server accept a connection from your system. News is awfully slow to start up. Especially for NNTP connections. There have been reports of problems such as access violations and hangs when using this feature.
News is still slow to start up to an NNTP server.
Will configure news to only show you new articles and will not retrieve the line count or posting date. Retrieving line counts and posting dates is notoriously time consuming. Note this requires, of course, that you have emacs installed on your system. Command recall doesn't work. The arrow keys have been bound to other commands.