From: Simon Lyall (simon@darkmere.gen.nz)
Date: Thu Nov 13 1997 - 20:47:58 CST
wording played with..
-- Simon Lyall. | Looking for Work | Mail: simon@darkmere.gen.nz "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | MT.x.x Definitions.
An "article" is the unit of news, analogous to a MAIL "message".
An "author" is the person or software that composes the body of the article and decides where and how it will be posted.
An "authoring agent" is software that assists the author in preparing the body of the article and possibly some of the headers.
A "poster" is the person or software that takes the finished article and prepares it for submission to the news stream.
A "posting agent" is software that assists posters to prepare articles, including adding required headers, determining whether the final article is compliant, passing it on to an injecting agent for for final checking and injection into the news stream if so, and informing the poster with an explanation if not or if the injection agent rejects the article.
An "injecting agent" takes the finished article from the posting agent (often via the NNTP "post" command ) performs some final checks and passes it on to a relaying agent for general distribution.
A "relaying agent" is software which receives allegedly compliant articles from injecting agents and/or other relaying agents, and possibly passes copies on to other relaying agents and serving agents.
A "serving agent" takes an article from a relaying agent and files it in a "news database" . It also provides an interface for reading agents to access the news database.
A "reader" is the person or software reading news articles.
A "reading agent" is software which presents articles to a reader.
A "newsgroup" is a single news forum, a logical bulletin board, having a name and nominally intended for articles on a specific topic. An article is "posted to" a single newsgroup or several newsgroups. When an article is posted to more than one newsgroup, it is said to be "crossposted"; note that this differs from posting the same text as part of each of several articles, one per newsgroup. A "hierarchy" is the set of all newsgroups whose names share a first component.
A newsgroup may be "moderated", in which case submissions are not posted directly, but mailed to a "moderator" for consideration and possible posting. Moderators are typically human but may be implemented partially or entirely in software.
A "followup" is an article containing a response to the contents of an earlier article (the followup's "precursor").
A "followup agent" is a combination of authoring agent and posting agent that aids in the preparation and posting of a followup.
A "reply agent" is a combination of reading agent and mailer that aids in the preparation and posting of an email response to an article. A "message ID" is a unique identifier for an article, usually supplied by the posting agent which posted it. It distinguishes the article from every other article ever posted anywhere. Articles with the same message ID are treated as identical copies of the same article even if they are not in fact identical.
A "gateway" is software which receives news articles and converts them to messages of some other kind (e.g. mail to a mailing list), or vice-versa; in essence it is a translating relaying agent that straddles boundaries between different methods of message exchange. The most common type of gateway connects newsgroup(s) to mailing list(s), either unidirectionally or bidirectionally, but there are also gateways between news networks using this Draft's news format and those using other formats.
A "control message" is an article which is marked as containing control information; a relaying or serving agent receiving such an article will (subject to permissions etc.) take actions beyond just filing and passing on the article.
An article's "reply address" is the address to which mailed replies should be sent. This is the address specified in the article's From header (see section 5.2), unless it also has a Reply-To header (see section 6.3).