docs/news.md

title nntp author lucitoast

breadpunk has a local-only NNTP server available. NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) is a protocol designed for the same use cases as forums and mailing lists, except everything is federated. It is usually better known as Usenet or simply as newsgroups.

Our NNTP server is however not connected to the rest of Usenet. Tildeverse.org should provide a news server for interested tildes, but it is currently announced as down, so our server is completely alone. It currently has the following groups:

• local.test: A default group from our server software which you can use for various testing purposes.
• bread.general: For all general discussions, when something does not fit any other group.
• bread.recipes: For sharing all your bread recipes!
• bread.meta: Discussions about breadpunk.club itself.
• bread.nomic: Discussions about the game of Nomic

Before joining the news server, it is strongly recommended to read some of the typical Usenet guidelines.

slrn setup

To reach our server using slrn, a rather simple news reader allowing you to use your own editor of choice to post, you can use a similar process as the one described on the Tildeverse server:

1. Get a sample .slrnrc file from the project on Sourceforge: wget -qO ~/.slrnrc http://slrn.sourceforge.net/docs/slrn.rc
2. Edit ~/.slrnrc
3. Uncomment (remove the leading %) the line defining username and set it to your bakername
4. Uncomment hostname and set it to breadpunk.club
5. Uncomment realname and set it to whatever you want to have as your real name: it will be displayed in all posts as From: realname <username@breadpunk.club>
6. If your editor of choice is Vim, uncomment the set editor_command line and set it to vim '+set tw=72 cc=+1 +%d '%s'. This will help you with the 72 character line limit of newsgroups and display a visual cue of this limit; see :help textwidth and :help colorcolumn in Vim to learn more.
7. Set up slrn by running slrn --create.
8. Use the arrow keys to browse the list of groups and press s to subscribe or u to unsubscribe. Unsubscribed groups have an uppercase U next to them.
9. Save your subscriptions and close by pressing q then y.

You can later run slrn to view your subscribed newsgroups and read, post or reply to articles. If you prefer to use a magic tunnel to access the newsgroup from a local client, you will want to forward port 119.