Re: Newsgrouper Update

On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 09:28:34 -0000 (UTC), Samuel S�derberg <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]