
                           The NOFFLE News Server
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Features

   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.
   
   It allows reading news offline with many news reader programs, even if
   they do not support offline reading by themselves.
   
   NOFFLE is written for the Linux operating system and freely available
   under GPL (see http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html).
   
   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 different modes:
          + In overview mode, opened articles that have not been
            completely downloaded yet are marked for download. NOFFLE
            generates a pseudo article telling the human about this.
          + In full mode, the complete articles are fetched.
          + Thread mode is like overview mode, but automatically
            downloads all article bodies that are in the same thread as
            articles that already have been read.
     * 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
       removed from the fetch list manually or automatically, when nobody
       accesses them for some time.
       
Compatibility with News Clients

   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 puts some
   requirements on the news reader program. See NOTES.txt for
   compatibility notes.
   
Getting NOFFLE

   NOFFLE can be downloaded from the NOFFLE homepage at
   http://home.t-online.de/home/markus.enzenberger/noffle.html:
   
     noffle-0.19.tar.gz (current release, 25 Apr 1999)
     noffle-0.17.tar.gz (last release, 25 Jan 1999)
     
   Read INSTALL.txt from the package for compiling and installing NOFFLE
   on your system.
   
   RPM packages have been created by Mario Moder (moderm@gmx.net). They
   are available at
   
     ftp://ftp.fbam.de/pub/linux/
     
   The current version is still beta. Please send bug reports, comments
   and patches to me (markus.enzenberger@t-online.de).
   
   If you want to receive announcements about NOFFLE, I will put you on
   my announcement list. Just send me a mail.
   
Links

     * NNTP information
       (http://www.tin.org/docs.html)
     * Leafnode - news server similar to NOFFLE
       (http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~krasel/leafnode.html)
     * SLRN - powerful news reader for Windows and Unix
       (http://space.mit.edu/~davis/slrn.html)
     * GNUS - Emacs news reader
       (http://www.gnus.org/
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   Last modified 5/99, Markus Enzenberger 
