Frequently Asked Questions about NEWSLIST

There's only really one question at the moment, though it takes a variety of forms:

Q. I click on a newsgroup shown on a newslist-produced page, but I can't get to the group.

And the answer is pretty easy too:

A. Ha! That's not my problem!

News, as you probably know, is delivered in a completely different way from the rest of the Web. All NEWSLIST does is to list the newsgroups available on a particular news server, and creates links which point to them.

It's probably that your browser is trying to talk to a news server which either:

a) doesn't have the news group you requested.

or

b) isn't willing to give it to you.

Your default news server is one of the options in your browser, and it will be used for links of the form:

news:comp.lang.java

but links can also explicitly specify a news server to use:

news://my.news.server/comp.lang.java

Some NEWSLIST-produced pages may be of the second type.

Most news servers are not publicly accessible, and not all news servers carry the same groups. You need to find out from your service provider which news server you should be using, and then suggest that they use NEWSLIST to give you a list of available groups from that server! Or you can always get hold of Python and run NEWSLIST yourself.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser