From: D <noreply@mixmin.net>
References: <1729782469-7@newsgrouper.org.uk> <vfsu82$23g7n$1@dont-email.me>
Subject: Re: Newsgrouper Update
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Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:29:46 +0000
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On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 09:28:34 -0000 (UTC), Samuel Söderberg <samuel@samuelsoderberg.se> wrote:
>On 24 Oct 2024 at 16:07:49 CEST, "Colin Macleod"
><user7@newsgrouper.org.uk.invalid> wrote:
>> I've made some updates to Newsgrouper, my web interface to Usenet.
>> It's now at https://newsgrouper.org.uk and the old url will redirect there.
>> The display of a thread is redesigned. If Javascript is enabled you can
>> navigate a thread with the keyboard:
>> - RightArrow will jump to the next message in the thread.
>> - LeftArrow will jump to the previous message in the thread.
>> - 'n' will jump to the next New message in the thread.
>> - 'v' will View the raw source of the current message.
>> There is a facility to block all posts from annoying people, like the
>> traditional "kill file", see "Block Poster" at the bottom of the article
>> display and the general "Preferences".
>> At the bottom of the list of threads for a group there is now a
>> "Find Articles" button which can search through 20 years worth of posts
>> for a specific string (or glob pattern) in the Subject or From field.
>
snip

>Google Groups resurrected...

no... it's far more like deja news; user friendly, "from" filters,
complete (untruncated) raw message source displayed in monospaced
text at the click of a button, and newsgrouper is also far better
because it is using major open news servers (e-s, blueworld), and
the sysadmin made this source code available for public scrutiny:

(using Tor Browser 14.0.1)
https://chiselapp.com/user/cmacleod/repository/newsgrouper/home
>Newsgrouper - a web interface to usenet newsgroups
>This is the Tcl code used to run my site https://newsgrouper.org.uk.
>It is not currently in a form where it would be very easy for someone
>else to install, but I'm making it available just in case anyone is
>interested. It has only been tested on Debian 12.
>I have moved confidential parameters like login credentials for the
>usenet server into config files, and I supply only dummy sample
>versions here. But there are many other things hard-coded which
>ideally would be configurable.
>Prerequisites
>  Tcl 9.0
>  Tk (only needed for the user_admin program)
>  Tcllib
>  Tclhttpd
>  TclTls (if https support is wanted)
>  Retcl (Tcl interface to Redis)
>  Tclsqlite (Tcl interface to sqlite)
>  Redis (any of the compatible forks should also work but I have not
>  tested this)
>  NNTP access to a usenet server
>  X-Face support needs the uncompface program (for Debian this is
>  part of the compface package)
>Downloads
>You can download the code from The Download Page.
>https://chiselapp.com/user/cmacleod/repository/newsgrouper/download
>Architecture
>Newsgrouper loads news headers and articles on-demand from one or
>more usenet servers. These are then cached locally for configurable
>times. This allows it to offer the full range of groups available
>on the server without needing huge local resources.
>The web server used here is Tclhttpd, which is itself implemented
>in Tcl. It is customised for this purpose by loading more Tcl code,
>principally server/news_code.tcl which generates all the Newsgrouper
>web pages on demand.
>Communication with the usenet server(s) is delegated to separate
>newsgetter processes. Each of these opens one NNTP connection to a
>usenet server. Most servers will permit up to 4 concurrent
>connections per login, so up to 4 newsgetter processes can be run
>per server.
>There is also a newsutility process, currently its only job is to
>generate PNG images from X-Face headers.
>Coordination of these processes and caching of their results is
>done through Redis, using the DisTcl system - see
>https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/DisTcl for more info about this.
>User login info, both for registered users and guests, is kept in
>a single sqlite table. A utility program user_admin can be used to
>initialise the database and to add registered users.
>Other user-specific info like their preferences and which groups
>they read is kept in Redis.
>License
>This software uses the ISC LICENSE:
>  Copyright (c) 2024 Colin G. Macleod
>  ...
[end quoted plain text]