RFC 2980 (rfc2980) - Page 2 of 27
Common NNTP Extensions
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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