usenet news
deepend; audiodude; xwindows


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[1] (administrator)
and ~xwindows[2] (technical troubleshooter).

News clients

slrn

slrn[3] is a newsreader; see http://slrn.sourceforge.net/[4] 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[5] might help. You can also read the
FAQ from U Washington[6].

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[7] 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[8].

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[9]).

[1] ../~deepend

[2] /~xwindows/

[3] slrn.html

[4] http://slrn.sourceforge.net

[5] http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Help/News/PineNews.html

[6] http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/news.html

[7] emacs.html

[8] tin.html

[9] email.html