Chapter 15. Usenet News
Usenet is a collection of bulletin-board-like newsgroups on the Internet, covering thousands of topics. Whatever your interest, chances are you’ll find a newsgroup in which it is discussed.
Usenet has been around since late 1979. The current implementation is based on the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), defined in RFC 977 and released in March 1986. Information is propagated through Usenet by a system of newsfeeds in which one site requests a newsfeed from another site, and a third site requests a newsfeed from the second site, etc. There is no central Usenet authority—like Perl, it runs on the spirit of cooperation and sharing. When you run a news reader, such as tin or the news reader in a web browser, your client software talks to the NNTP server on the news host. When you post a message to a newsgroup, this posting is received by your NNTP server and passed on to other servers throughout the distribution area you specified for the posting. Each server periodically receives updated newsgroup information and newly posted news articles.
This chapter explores NNTP commands and responses. It introduces Net::NNTP, which implements NNTP commands and simplifies the process of writing a Perl-based NNTP news client. It also describes News::Newsrc, a module that provides methods for managing a .newsrc file.
There are two kinds of NNTP commands—the official set of commands as defined in RFC 977 and a number of extensions that have been added since the RFC ...
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