view README.html @ 38:8e972daaeab9 noffle

[svn] Applied patch from Jim Hague: - Forget cached group info when group database closed. - Added list of 'forbidden' newsgroup specs. - Fixed problem with article numbering if the overview file empties. - Changed %i to %d in sscanfs (%i interprets leading zeros as octal numbers) - New groups now always start numbering at article 1. - Record newsgroup posting status. Enforce it at posting time. Added --modify - Added group deletion. - Added wildmat code taken from INN
author enz
date Fri, 05 May 2000 08:23:15 +0100
parents 526a4c34ee2e
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<title>NOFFLE</title>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="NOFFLE is a news server for Linux that is optimized for low speed dialup connections to the Internet and few users. It can be used to add offline reading capability to news readers.">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="noffle, news server, news reader, offline, modem, dialup, linux">
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<center>
<h1>The NOFFLE News Server</h1>
</center>

<p>
<hr>
<p>

<ul>
<li>
<a href="#features">Features</a>
<li>
<a href="#compatibility">Compatibility with News Clients</a>
<li>
<a href="#getting">Getting NOFFLE</a>
<li>
<a href="#documentation">Documentation</a>
<li>
<a href="#links">Links</a>
<li>
<a href="#acknowledgements">Acknowledgements</a>
</ul>

<p>
<hr>
<p>

<h2><a name="features">Features</a></h2>

NOFFLE is a
<a href=http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=usenet>Usenet</a>
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
<a href=http://www.linux.org/>Linux </a>
operating system and freely available under
<a href=http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html>GPL</a>.
<p>
While Online:
<ul>
<li>
Any newsgroup can be read, selected articles are fetched
immediately from the remote server.
</ul>
<p>
While Offline:
<ul>
<li>
Allows reading news offline with many news clients,
even if they do not support offline reading by themselves.
</li>
<li>
Groups can be retrieved in overview, full or thread mode.
<ul>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
In full mode, complete articles are fetched at once.
</li>
<li>
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).
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
The news feed is invoked automatically next online time by calling
NOFFLE in the ip-up script.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
</ul>

<h2><a name="compatibility">Compatibility with News Clients</a></h2>

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.
<p>
Subscribing to groups in overview mode or thread mode requires the
following from the news reader program:
<p>
<ul>
<li>
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.
<p>
<li>
The reader should rarely open article bodies automatically,
because it will mark them unwantedly for download.
</ul>

<p>

<h2><a name="getting">Getting NOFFLE</a></h2>

NOFFLE can be downloaded from this web site.
<blockquote>
<tt><a href=./noffle-1.0pre5.tar.gz>noffle-1.0pre5.tar.gz</a></tt>
(current release, 18 Apr 2000)
<br>
<tt><a href=./noffle-1.0pre4.tar.gz>noffle-1.0pre4.tar.gz</a></tt>
(current release, 13 Nov 1999)
</blockquote>
RPM packages have been created by
<a href="mailto:moderm@gmx.net">Mario Moder</a>. They are available
at 
<blockquote>
<tt><a href="ftp://ftp.fbam.de/pub/linux/">ftp://ftp.fbam.de/pub/linux/</a></tt>
</blockquote>
<p>

<img src="img_new.gif" width="32" height="16" alt="[NEW]">
I moved Noffle to
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/">SourceForge</a>
recently. You can download files from the
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1044">Noffle project page</a>.
There is also a mailing list and a discussion forum.

<h2><a name="documentation">Documentation</a></h2>

Read the files README and INSTALL from the package
for compiling and installing NOFFLE on your system.
<p>
Some German documentation
(<img src="img_german.gif" width="16" height="14" alt="[Deutsch]">
<a href="http://home.t-online.de/home/klaus.moedinger/noffle_install_de.html">"NOFFLE Installation"</a>)
is provided by
<a href="mailto:klaus.moedinger@t-online.de">Klaus M&ouml;dinger</a>.
<p>
The current version is still beta. Please send bug reports,
comments and patches to
<a href="mailto:markus.enzenberger@t-online.de">
markus.enzenberger@t-online.de</a>.
<p>

<h2><a name="links">Links</a></h2>

<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.tin.org/docs.html">NNTP information</a>
<li>
<a href="http://www.privat.kkf.net/~mark.bulmahn/ncontr.html">ncontr</a>
- graphical front-end for NOFFLE by
<a href="mailto:mbu@privat.kkf.net">Mark Bulmahn</a>
<li>
<a href="http://www.leafnode.org/">
Leafnode</a> - news server similar to NOFFLE
<li>
<a href="http://space.mit.edu/~davis/slrn.html">SLRN</a>
- powerful news reader for Windows and Unix  
<li>
<a href="http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/index.html">WWWOFFLE</a>
- http proxy
</ul>


<h2><a name="acknowledgements">Acknowledgements</a></h2>

The <i>wildmat</i> newsgroup pattern matching software used by NOFFLE
was developed by Rich Salz, and is as distributed with INN
v2.2.

<p>
<hr>
<small><i>
Last modified 4/2000,
<a href="mailto:markus.enzenberger@t-online.de">Markus Enzenberger</a>
</i></small>

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