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The Noffle News Server
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Features
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Noffle is a Usenet news server optimized for few users and low speed dial-up
connections to the Internet. It acts as a server to news clients running on
the local host, but gets its news feed by acting as a client to a remote
server. Noffle is written for the GNU/Linux operating system and freely
available under the terms of the GPL. See COPYING for details.

While Online:

 * Any newsgroup can be read, selected articles are fetched immediately from
   the remote server.

While Offline:

 * Allows reading news offline with many news clients, even if they do not
   support offline reading by themselves.

 * Groups can be retrieved in overview, full or thread mode.
    * In overview mode, opened articles that have not been completely
      downloaded yet are marked for download. Noffle generates a pseudo
      article body telling the human about this.
    * In full mode, complete articles are fetched at once.
    * Thread mode is like overview mode, but opening an article marks the whole
      thread for download (all later articles for some time that are
      referencing the original article).

 * The news feed is invoked automatically next online time by calling Noffle
   in the ip-up script.

 * Groups can be put on the fetch list via the 'noffle' command or
   automatically when someone tries to read them. Groups can be automatically
   removed from the fetch list, when nobody accesses them for some time.

 * Noffle also offers limited support for local groups. Articles posted in
   local groups appear in the news database for those groups immediately,
   and are expired in the same way as other articles.


Compatibility with News Clients
-------------------------------

See docs/NOTES for information about news client software.


Getting Noffle
--------------

The current stable release is:      1.0.1

The current development release is: none

The Noffle homepage is at:

    http://noffle.sourceforge.net/

Official releases can be downloaded at the File Releases section
of the Noffle project page:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/noffle

The latest development snapshot is available via CVS at:

    http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=1044


Installation
------------

Read INSTALL for information about compiling and installing Noffle.


Documentation
-------------

Read the files in the subdirectory docs/ and the manual pages
noffle(1) and noffle.conf(5) for more information on Noffle.

There is a noffle-users mailing list at SourceForge:

    http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=1044

Bugs should be submitted here:

    http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=1044


Acknowledgements
----------------

The wildmat newsgroup pattern matching software used by Noffle was developed
by Rich Salz, and is distributed with INN v2.2. 
