MyNews and the Hamster

The Hamster is another news-server for private use. Here some details about it - and how to cooperate:

The Hamster has a few advantages when you compare it with MyNews:

• It comes with an extremely flexible scripting tool - you can automatisize nearly everything.
• Hamster comes with a lot of additional programs
• Hamster is open source (GNU) and freeware.
• A lot of programmers are developing on the Hamster - you can join them
• Hamster downloads and sends also EMAIL! This is a killer feature if you have multiple eMail accounts.

Of course Hamster has also a few disadvantages compared to MyNews:

• Hamster is not (yet) designed for P2P - it is not designed to deliver messages to the Internet.Sharing messages is not the purpose.
• Hamster is usually downloading ENTIRE newsgroups - selection is done by filtering and scoring. This is not too practical for daily use.
  So it is hard to use for binary groups - but great for text groups.
• ..... (I dont want to investigate further on this - Hamster is not a competitor, but a good friend and partner for me)

All this is not important and might be a question of personal taste. More important is:

Cooperation of Hamster and MyNews users

Both servers speak NNTP - so they should be able to cooperate. This has not been developed yet, but it might work this way:

If the Hamster- and the MyNews users both have dynamic IP address services, then they can find each others. Hamster might be able to feed MyNews with POST (or IHAVE). Hamster are able to download directly from MyNews.

Perhaps I will create a small tool which allows Hamster users to contact the MyNews network and use the root server for dynamic name resolution. Then Hamster might be far easier to find.

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