1NEWSGROUPS(5) InterNetNews Documentation NEWSGROUPS(5)
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6 newsgroups - List of newsgroups and their short descriptions
7
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.
15 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.
22 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.
27 Each line of the newsgroups file consists of two fields separated by at
29 least one tabulation:
30 <name>\t<description>
32 The first field is the name of the newsgroup. The second field is its
34 description.
35 You can get the newsgroups file of another NNTP server with getlist(1).
37
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.
47 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:
54 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.
58 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.
68 Here is an example of moderated newsgroup:
70 news.lists.misc News-related statistics and lists. (Moderated)
72 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.
76 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.
83 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.
87 Descriptions must not contain any control characters (octets between
89 0x00 and 0x1F).
90
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.
101
103 The minimal newsgroups file shipped with INN is:
104 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).
111 These lines must be tab-delimited, so please be careful in case you
113 copy and paste them from above.
114
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>.
121
123 active(5), controlchan(8), ctlinnd(8), getlist(1), nnrpd(8).
124INN 2.7.1 2022-07-10 NEWSGROUPS(5)