usenet news

authors:

~deepend

~audiodude

~xwindows


table of contents

As of 2020-04-14 news is back up! §

You’ll need a news (NNTP) client to read news. The address to use inside of Tilde.club is localhost port 119. The address to use outside is news.tilde.club port 119 (plain), or port 563 (with TLS, available since 2023-02-17). If you connect from outside of Tilde servers, e.g. from home, you would have to use TLS and authenticate using your Tilde.club username and password, to be able to post.

This netnews service is brought to you by ~deepend (administrator) and ~xwindows (technical troubleshooter).

News clients §

slrn §

slrn is a newsreader; see http://slrn.sourceforge.net/ for details.

First, add export NNTPSERVER="localhost" to your shellrc (.bashrc, .zshrc) and source it (source path/to/.shellrc).

Then run slrn --create to create the slrn config file, and lastly slrn -d to populate group names.

You’re now ready to run slrn! If the list is empty, press L (for list-groups) and enter * in the field for all groups. You might need to enter each group (pressing space) to get a proper count for how many (if any) unread messages there are.

pine/alpine §

Pine can read news; this tutorial might help. You can also read the FAQ from U Washington.

If you use Pine from inside Tilde.club, configure it by:

  1. ‘S’ for setup, ‘C’ for config, then
  2. set ‘NNTP Server (for news)’ to localhost
  3. Then go back to the main menu, and pick Folder List,
  4. A for add, ^t for list

Emacs §

M-x gnus in emacs can read news, but you better know emacs first before you start.

lynx §

Lynx reads news, a la lynx nntp://news.tilde.club/local.general. It can even post news, but you have to design your own headers.

tin §

There is also tin.

Thunderbird §

If you are a Tilde.club member and already using Thunderbird for email; it can also be configured for news.

  1. Go to the Tools menu (Edit menu in case of Unix-like system) -> Account Settings. Or in versions without a menu bar: hamburger menu -> Preferences -> Account Settings.
  2. Under Account Actions click Add Other Account...
  3. Select “Newsgroup Account”
  4. Type in the name you and email address you want associated with your posts. This can be your real name and tilde.club email address, or any other name (like your tilde username) and any other email address.
  5. For the “Newsgroup Server” type news.tilde.club. Give it a name (“news.tilde.club” works fine), confirm a couple of times, and you should see a new entry for news.tilde.club in the left panel of the Account Settings dialog.
  6. Select Server Settings under it, and change Connection security to “SSL/TLS”; you would see that the Port setting above it changed to 563. (If it doesn’t do that automatically, make it so)
  7. Press OK to close the Account Settings dialog.
  8. Right click on “news.tilde.club” in your accounts list and click Subscribe...
  9. You should see a dialog with a tree of news topics. Click one and click Subscribe to subscribe to the topic. When Thunderbird is running, it will periodically check for new messages to each of these topics. You will also see a list of topics in your accounts list with unread counts.
  10. To post to a topic, open the topic and click the “Write” button.
  11. When you click Send on your new post, Thunderbird would ask for your Tilde.club username and password (which is the same as the one you use on your Tilde.club email).