MyNews - Additional information

About MyNews... and Non-MyNews NNTP servers ... and Usenet in general

What is MyNews ?

A few essays about MyNews

Dont use MyNews if....

Free and Open newsservers

Tools and Links

Firewalls, Hackers and Paranoia

The release history is here: Release pages...

The FULL release notes: These are the unfiltered documentation files from the programmer. They are sometimes hard to understand, bt perhaps you enjoy them. Those who write such tools themselves might be happy to read something:

• Changes for version 1.9
• Changes for version 1.7
• Changes for version 1.6
• Changes for version 1.5
• Changes for version 1.2

Extensions of the NNTP-Protocol (RFC977 & 2980) for communication between MyNews servers: MyNNTP.htm

Step by Step tutorial (outdated by progress of development - but still here)

This site is not just about MyNews - here you find also a lot of useful information

• Lost in Usenet (Usenet References)
• Usenet from about.com (Usenet Knowhow)
• Pitfalls for private news servers and the Usenet (Trouble with admins?)
• How to become a Usenet site ?
• RFCs about Usenet
• ...

Pitfalls for private news servers and the Usenet (Trouble with admins?)

There are a lot of problems which could occur for newbies if nobody cares of them. I do - so here some tips:

• Newsgroup naming conventions
  You can create your own, private newsgroups - because this is your own, private news-server (no matter if this is a Hamster, a MyNews, an INN...) But you should take CARE about the names for your newsgroups:
  First you should adapt the normal hierachic naming convention for newsgroups. The first part is the 'hierarchy-name' and a lot of those names are already reserved. More info in the newsgroup: news.admin.hierarchies or at: www.magma.ca/~leisen/mlnh/
  
• Local hierarchies: Newsgroups which are just used inside your company or your house should start with: LOCAL.*
  Make sure thast local.* newsgroups are never transmitted to Usenet - or other servers outside your reach.
• If you dont know it better, then add only existing newsgroups. The freeware version of MyNews does restrict you to this!
• NEVER crosspost between a local.* or private.* or mynews.* newsgroup and an 'official' Usenet newsgroup. This might confuse some Usenet servers.
• Be sure to have moderated groups correctly handled. Best is to post messages to moderated newsgroups without path or own message id to your Usenet-provider. He will handle these posts pretty good. It is hard to find out which groups are moderated and which are not! Not even the 'official' lists are reliable. MyNews is offering the 'official' grouplist from isc.org.
• If you run MyNews: Dont crosspost to non-existing newsgroups.
• If you run a MyNews-Gateway: Never send crossposted messages with non existing groups or local groups to Usenet!
• ...
• Path: MyNews inserts itself properly into the Path-Line. At the begining (the last entry) it uses: !usenet
• Message-ID: MyNews uses its unique servername to create message ids: XXXXXXXX@YOURNAME.winews.net
  The online registration guarantees that your name is unique - which is a requirement for posts to Usenet.
• Some Usenet-servers are ignorring your PATH and MESSAGE-ID: In these cases you will see your own messages twice - and all other MyNews users as well!
•  

RFCs about Usenet

These RFCs (Request for Comment == a kind of normative standard) are used for Usenet (and MyNews) messages and transport:

• RFC-977 - Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
• RFC-2980 - Common NNTP Extensions
• RFC-1036
• RFC-822

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