Re: LYNX-DEV reading/posting news

[Foteos Macrides]

Laura Eaves <address@hidden> wrote:
>I tried reading news on nntp://netnews.voicenet.com.
>I was able to read articles and post a followup without any problem.
>The article I posted was posted ok.  (I read it back using tin.)
>
>One questionable behavior:
>I noticed that there are not nearly as many newsgroups displayed
>when I read from lynx, compared with tin.  I assume from the discussion on
>lynx-dev that lynx doesn't attempt to process .newsrc.  So I didn't expect
>it to load the newsgroups I was subscribed to, or display only the unread
>articles.  However, my .newsrc (created by tin) contains 18990 newsgroups.
>When I run lynx, it only displays 1286 newsgroup links.  (And most of the
>groups I'm subscribed to aren't included.)
>Is this a bug?
>I wondered if there would be a link at the bottom of the newsgroups page
>saying something like "click here for more newsgroups", but there was none.

        That's a longstanding limitation of the CERN libwww-based gateway
for reading news.  That URL is actually  nntp://netnews.voicenet.com/*
Lynx fills in the "/*" for you, but without a slash and either the wildcard
for a listing of all available groups, a newsgroup name for a listing
of all available articles in the group, or an article identifier, it's
technically an invalid URL.

        When the path is the "*" wildcard, Lynx connects to the designated
nntp server and sends it a  LIST NEWSGROUPS  command, then converts the
reply, consisting of newsgroups and descriptions for groups which that
server carries directly, into an HTML stream with the newsgroups
converted to links with HREFs in the format for requesting listings of
articles in the groups.  For your starting URL, those would have the
format  nntp://netnews.voicenet.com/news.group

        The initial list will contain as many links as the LIST NEWSGROUPS
command returned in its list according to the nntp protocol.  If it were
18990, that would be quite a list of links for Lynx and you to choke on. :)

        You're better off toggling to source for the original listing,
and then using it as a model for creating a bookmark file with links
for those newsgroups which you do want to read with Lynx.

        What happens when you send that server a  GROUP news.group  command
via an  nntp://netnews.voicenet.com/news.group  URL for a news.group which
isn't in the list returned via the LIST NEWSGROUPS command?

                                Fote

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