1NEWSGROUPS(5)             InterNetNews Documentation             NEWSGROUPS(5)
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NAME

6       newsgroups - List of newsgroups and their short descriptions
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DESCRIPTION

9       The file pathdb/newsgroups contains a list of newsgroups for which a
10       short description is available.  This file is generally updated by
11       controlchan(8) whenever a control message is received; it is used by
12       nnrpd in response to LIST NEWSGROUPS and is only meant to provide
13       information to users.  News readers often show the list of carried
14       newsgroups along with these descriptions.
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16       It is not necessary that all the groups carried by the news server
17       (that is to say all the groups listed in the active file) be listed in
18       the newsgroups file.  And it is also not necessary that all the groups
19       listed in the newsgroups file be carried by the news server.
20       Nonetheless, it is of course better if the active and newsgroups files
21       have exactly the same newsgroups.
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23       If you use "ctlinnd newgroup" to manually create a group, only the
24       active file is updated.  You should then edit the newsgroups file in
25       order to add a short description for the created group.  The same goes
26       for manually removing or changing the status of a newsgroup.
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28       Each line of the newsgroups file consists of two fields separated by at
29       least one tabulation:
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31           <name>\t<description>
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33       The first field is the name of the newsgroup.  The second field is its
34       description.
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36       You can get the newsgroups file of another NNTP server with getlist(1).
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PREFERRED FORMAT FOR A ONE-LINE NEWSGROUP DESCRIPTION

39       As far as the format of the newsgroups file is concerned, there is a
40       preferred format for each line.  Since news administrators do not
41       generally have the time to fix up the lines that are being
42       automatically included from newgroup or checkgroups messages, this
43       information is provided so that control message senders can craft
44       better control messages.  It will also be useful for news
45       administrators to know how to format the description of their local
46       newsgroups.
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48       There should be at least one hard tab (8 column tab stops) between the
49       group name and the description.  If the group name is at least 16
50       characters, it should be followed with one tab.  If the group name is
51       at least 8 characters, it should be followed with two tabs.  And in the
52       unlikely event the group name is less than 8 characters, it should be
53       followed with three tabs.  For instance:
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55           misc.transport.rail.europe  Railroads & railways in all of Europe.
56           news.admin.nocem    NoCeM protocol policy issues and information.
57           news.groups         Discussions and lists of newsgroups.
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59       The total line length should be at most 79 columns.  The description
60       should start with a capital and not be more than 55 characters (79 -
61       24) long.  If the group name is longer than 24 characters, the
62       description should be correspondingly shorter.  If the group is
63       moderated, it should have " (Moderated)" (note the space before the
64       opening parenthesis) at the very end of the description, not counted as
65       part of the length of the description.  This text must be exactly that,
66       with no variations, as it is used by news software to find moderated
67       groups.
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69       Here is an example of moderated newsgroup:
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71           news.lists.misc     News-related statistics and lists. (Moderated)
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73       Traditionally, all newsgroup descriptions ended with a period, but this
74       is not necessary and steals away one character that is occasionally
75       useful for forming a better description.
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77       Some over-long descriptions could be made to easily fit the length by
78       dropping useless wordings like "Discussion of" which do not
79       meaningfully contribute to the description.  Others are usually pretty
80       easy to get to no more than column eighty, except when the group names
81       start getting really long.  Hopefully then the group name itself
82       contains quite a bit of description.
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84       In some cases, a longer description really will be necessary; they can
85       of course be used within the newsgroups file.  However, they will
86       probably be less readable and less useful for some Usenet users.
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88       Descriptions must not contain any control characters (octets between
89       0x00 and 0x1F).
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ENCODING OF THE DESCRIPTIONS

92       There is, at present, no good mechanism for managing the character set
93       of the newsgroup descriptions.  Many non-English hierarchies include
94       newsgroup descriptions in their native languages, since this is more
95       useful for their users, and those are included verbatim in the
96       newsgroups file.  This unfortunately means that different lines of the
97       file will require different character set settings to read properly,
98       and those character sets are not documented in the file.  Hopefully
99       some future standard will provide a way to address this; in the
100       meantime, using UTF-8 for non-ASCII characters is recommended.
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MINIMAL NEWSGROUPS FILE

103       The minimal newsgroups file shipped with INN is:
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105           control             Various control messages (no posting).
106           control.cancel      Cancel messages (no posting).
107           control.checkgroups Hierarchy check control messages (no posting).
108           control.newgroup    Newsgroup creation control messages (no posting).
109           control.rmgroup     Newsgroup removal control messages (no posting).
110           junk                Unfiled articles (no posting).
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112       These lines must be tab-delimited, so please be careful in case you
113       copy and paste them from above.
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HISTORY

116       Written by Julien Elie for InterNetNews.  The preferred format for a
117       one-line newsgroup description is based on the policies by which the
118       newsgroups file in <https://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/> is
119       maintained; they were originally written by David Lawrence
120       <tale@isc.org> and updated by Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>.
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SEE ALSO

123       active(5), controlchan(8), ctlinnd(8), getlist(1), nnrpd(8).
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127INN 2.6.5                         2022-01-23                     NEWSGROUPS(5)
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