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The NOFFLE News Server
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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>