The Noffle News Server
Noffle is a
Usenet
news server optimized for few users and low speed dial-up connections
to the Internet.
It acts as a server to news clients running on the
local host, but gets its news feed by acting as a client to a remote server.
Noffle is written for the
GNU/Linux
operating system and freely available under
GPL.
(Recent versions of Noffle have been built on other Unix systems,
but not tested.)
While Online:
-
Any newsgroup can be read, selected articles are fetched
immediately from the remote server.
While Offline:
-
Allows reading news offline with many news clients,
even if they do not support offline reading by themselves.
-
Groups can be retrieved in overview, full or thread mode.
-
In overview mode, opened articles that have not been completely downloaded
yet are marked for download. Noffle generates a pseudo article body telling
the human about this.
-
In full mode, complete articles are fetched at once.
-
Thread mode is like overview mode, but opening an article marks the
whole thread for download (all later articles for some time
that are referencing the original article).
-
The news feed is invoked automatically next online time by calling
Noffle in the ip-up script.
-
Groups can be put on the fetch list via the 'noffle'
command or
automatically when someone tries to read them. Groups can be automatically
removed from the fetch list, when nobody accesses them for some time.
Subscribing to groups in full mode should work with any news reader.
Caching of articles is unnecessary, since Noffle already caches them
and should be switched off.
Subscribing to groups in overview mode or thread mode requires the
following from the news reader program:
-
It must not cache articles at all (or allow to switch the cache off),
because the article bodies change from the pseudo body
"marked for download" to the real body.
-
The reader should rarely open article bodies automatically,
because it will mark them unwantedly for download.
The latest releases of Noffle can be downloaded from the
File List of the
Noffle Project Page at Sourceforge.
There is also
CVS access to the current development version.
Some old RPM packages are available from
Jim Hague's Noffle page. Noffle has also been packaged
for Linux Mandrake.
Noffle is included in the
Debian GNU/Linux
distribution, thanks to
Paul Slootman and
Martin Godisch for maintaining
the Noffle Debian Package.
Read the files README and INSTALL from the package
for compiling and installing Noffle on your system.
Users can talk to each other on the
Noffle-Users Mailing List.
New releases and other important news are announced on the
Noffle-Announce Mailing List.
Bugs should be reported to the
Noffle Bug Tracker.
