Ubuntu Manpage: newsgroups - List of newsgroups and their short descriptions

NAME

       newsgroups - List of newsgroups and their short descriptions

DESCRIPTION

       The file pathdb/newsgroups contains a list of newsgroups for which a short description is
       available.  This file is generally updated by controlchan(8) whenever a control message is
       received; it is used by nnrpd in response to LIST NEWSGROUPS and is only meant to provide
       information to users.  News readers often show the list of carried newsgroups along with
       these descriptions.

       It is not necessary that all the groups carried by the news server (that is to say all the
       groups listed in the active file) be listed in the newsgroups file.  And it is also not
       necessary that all the groups listed in the newsgroups file be carried by the news server.
       Nonetheless, it is of course better if the active and newsgroups files have exactly the
       same newsgroups.

       If you use "ctlinnd newgroup" to manually create a group, only the active file is updated.
       You should then edit the newsgroups file in order to add a short description for the
       created group.  The same goes for manually removing or changing the status of a newsgroup.

       Each line of the newsgroups file consists of two fields separated by at least one
       tabulation:

           <name>\t<description>

       The first field is the name of the newsgroup.  The second field is its description.

       You can get the newsgroups file of another NNTP server with getlist(1).

PREFERRED FORMAT FOR A ONE-LINE NEWSGROUP DESCRIPTION

As far as the format of the newsgroups file is concerned, there is a preferred format for
each line. Since news administrators do not generally have the time to fix up the lines
that are being automatically included from newgroup or checkgroups messages, this
information is provided so that control message senders can craft better control messages.
It will also be useful for news administrators to know how to format the description of
their local newsgroups.

There should be at least one hard tab (8 column tab stops) between the group name and the
description. If the group name is at least 16 characters, it should be followed with one
tab. If the group name is at least 8 characters, it should be followed with two tabs.
And in the unlikely event the group name is less than 8 characters, it should be followed
with three tabs. For instance:

misc.transport.rail.europe Railroads & railways in all of Europe.
news.admin.nocem NoCeM protocol policy issues and information.
news.groups Discussions and lists of newsgroups.

The total line length should be at most 79 columns. The description should start with a
capital and not be more than 55 characters (79 - 24) long. If the group name is longer
than 24 characters, the description should be correspondingly shorter. If the group is
moderated, it should have " (Moderated)" (note the space before the opening parenthesis)
at the very end of the description, not counted as part of the length of the description.
This text must be exactly that, with no variations, as it is used by news software to find
moderated groups.

Here is an example of moderated newsgroup:

news.lists.misc News-related statistics and lists. (Moderated)

Traditionally, all newsgroup descriptions ended with a period, but this is not necessary
and steals away one character that is occasionally useful for forming a better
description.

Some over-long descriptions could be made to easily fit the length by dropping useless
wordings like "Discussion of" which do not meaningfully contribute to the description.
Others are usually pretty easy to get to no more than column eighty, except when the group
names start getting really long. Hopefully then the group name itself contains quite a
bit of description.

In some cases, a longer description really will be necessary; they can of course be used
within the newsgroups file. However, they will probably be less readable and less useful
for some Usenet users.

Descriptions must not contain any control characters (octets between 0x00 and 0x1F).

ENCODING OF THE DESCRIPTIONS

       There is, at present, no good mechanism for managing the character set of the newsgroup
       descriptions.  Many non-English hierarchies include newsgroup descriptions in their native
       languages, since this is more useful for their users, and those are included verbatim in
       the newsgroups file.  This unfortunately means that different lines of the file will
       require different character set settings to read properly, and those character sets are
       not documented in the file.  Hopefully some future standard will provide a way to address
       this; in the meantime, using UTF-8 for non-ASCII characters is recommended.

MINIMAL NEWSGROUPS FILE

       The minimal newsgroups file shipped with INN is:

           control             Various control messages (no posting).
           control.cancel      Cancel messages (no posting).
           control.checkgroups Hierarchy check control messages (no posting).
           control.newgroup    Newsgroup creation control messages (no posting).
           control.rmgroup     Newsgroup removal control messages (no posting).
           junk                Unfiled articles (no posting).

       These lines must be tab-delimited, so please be careful in case you copy and paste them
       from above.

HISTORY