RFC 2980 (rfc2980) - Page 2 of 27

Common NNTP Extensions

RFC 2980                 Common NNTP Extensions             October 2000


   This document does not specify an Internet Standard of any kind.  It
   only attempts to document current practices.  While this document may
   clarify some ambiguity in RFC 977, RFC 977 should be regarded as
   authoritative in all cases.  There are some implementations that are
   not strictly RFC 977 compliant and where necessary, these deviations
   from the standard will be noted.  This document does reflect the work
   of the IETF NNTP-EXT working group chaired by Ned Freed and Stan
   Barber.

   This document is provided to help implementers have a uniform source
   of information about extensions, however, it is important for any
   prospective implementer to understand that the extensions listed here
   are NOT part of any current standard for NNTP.  In fact, some of the
   ones listed in this document should not be included in new NNTP
   implementations as they should no longer be used modern NNTP
   environments.  Such commands should be considered historic and are
   documented as such in this document.

   Extensions fall into three categories: transport, newsreader and
   other.  Transport extensions are additions to the NNTP specification
   that were made specifically to move news articles from one server to
   another server.  Newsreader extensions are additions to the NNTP
   specification that were made to assist NNTP clients in selecting and
   retrieving news articles from servers.  Other extensions to the NNTP
   specification are those which did not specifically fall into either
   of the other two categories.  Examples of other extensions include
   authentication and time-of-day extensions.  For each command, the
   format of section 3 of RFC 977 will be used.

1. Transport Extensions

   A transport extension is one which is primarily used in inter-server
   communications.  Following are the descriptions of each transport
   extension commands and the responses which will be returned by those
   commands.

   Each command is shown in upper case for clarity, although case is
   ignored in the interpretation of commands by the NNTP server.  Any
   parameters are shown in lower case.  A parameter shown in [square
   brackets] is optional.  For example, [GMT] indicates that the
   triglyph GMT may present or omitted.  A parameter that may be
   repeated is followed by an ellipsis.









Barber                       Informational