--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/README	Fri May 05 21:26:14 2000 +0100
@@ -0,0 +1,145 @@
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+The NOFFLE News Server
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Features
+--------
+
+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
+-------------------------------
+
+Subscribing to groups in full mode should work with any news reader. Caching
+of articles is unnecessary, since NOFFLE already caches them and should be
+switched off.
+
+Subscribing to groups in overview mode or thread mode requires the following
+from the news reader program:
+
+ * It must not cache articles at all (or allow to switch the cache off),
+   because the article bodies change from the pseudo body "marked for download"
+   to the real body.
+
+ * The reader should rarely open article bodies automatically, because it will
+   mark them unwantedly for download.
+
+
+Getting NOFFLE
+--------------
+
+NOFFLE can be downloaded from the following location:
+
+ http://home.t-online.de/home/markus.enzenberger/noffle-1.0pre5.tar.gz
+ (18 Apr 2000)
+
+ http://home.t-online.de/home/markus.enzenberger/noffle-1.0pre4.tar.gz
+ (13 Nov 1999)
+
+You can always get the latest version from CVS. For instructions see
+
+ http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=1044
+
+
+RPM packages have been created by Mario Moder <moderm@gmx.net>. They are
+available at 
+
+ ftp://ftp.fbam.de/pub/linux/ 
+
+
+I moved Noffle to SourceForge recently (http://sourceforge.net/).
+
+You can download files from the Noffle project page at
+ http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1044
+
+There is also a mailing list and a discussion forum.
+
+
+Installation
+------------
+
+Read INSTALL for information about compiling and installing Noffle.
+
+
+Documentation
+-------------
+
+Read the files in the subdirectory docs/ for more info on NOFFLE.
+Read INSTALL for information about compiling and installing NOFFLE on your
+system.
+
+Some German documentation is provided by
+Klaus Mödinger <klaus.moedinger@t-online.de>:
+
+ http://home.t-online.de/home/klaus.moedinger/noffle_install_de.html
+
+
+The current version is still beta. Please send bug reports, comments and
+patches to Markus Enzenberger <markus.enzenberger@t-online.de>.
+
+
+Links
+-----
+
+ * http://www.tin.org/docs.html
+   NNTP information
+
+ * http://www.privat.kkf.net/~mark.bulmahn/ncontr.html
+   ncontr -- a graphical front-end for NOFFLE by
+   Mark Bulmahn <mbu@privat.kkf.net>
+
+ * http://www.leafnode.org/
+   Leafnode -- a news server similar to NOFFLE
+
+ * http://space.mit.edu/~davis/slrn.html
+   slrn -- a powerful news reader for Windows and Unix
+
+ * http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/index.html
+   WWWOFFLE - http proxy
+
+
+Acknowledgements
+----------------
+
+The wildmat newsgroup pattern matching software used by NOFFLE was developed
+by Rich Salz, and is distributed with INN v2.2. 
+
+
+-- 
+Markus Enzenberger <markus.enzenberger@t-online.de>
+