From: Simon Lyall (simon@darkmere.gen.nz)
Date: Tue Sep 02 1997 - 21:48:36 CDT
I have taken the definitions from son-of-rfc1036 and slightly changed them
to reflect our new use of posting-agent and injecting-agent.
I have also stripped out a few definitions that were covered in
draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt which we can generally refer to rather than
writing up ourselves.
Comments on other changes needed? (apart for the section references)
-- Simon Lyall. | Looking for Work | Mail: simon@darkmere.gen.nz "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | MT.-cut-here-
Definitions
An "article" is the unit of news, analogous to a MAIL "mes- sage".
A "poster" is a human being (or software equivalent) that composes the body of the article and creates the general headers including Newsgroups, Subject and Followup-To.
A "posting agent" is software that assists posters to prepare articles, including determining whether the final article is compliant, passing it on to a "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 protocol) performs some final checks and passes it on to a relayer for general distribution.
A "relayer" is software which receives allegedly-compliant articles from posting agents and/or other relayers, files copies in a "news database", and possibly passes copies on to other relayers.
A "reader" is a human being 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 news- group 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 com- ponent.
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 typi- cally human but may be implemented partially or entirely in software.
A "followup" is an article containing a response to the con- tents of an earlier article (the followup's "precursor"). A "followup agent" is a combination of reading agent and post- ing agent that aids in the preparation and posting of a fol- lowup.
A "cooperating subnet" is a set of news-exchanging hosts which is sufficiently well-coordinated (typically via a cen- tral administration of some sort) that stronger assumptions can be made about hosts in the set than about news hosts in general. This is typically used to relax restrictions which are otherwise required for worst-case interoperability; mem- bers of a cooperating subnet MAY interchange articles that do not conform to this Draft's specifications, provided all members have agreed to this and provided the articles are not permitted to leak out of the subnet. The word "subnet" is used to emphasize that a cooperating subnet is typically not an isolated universe; care must be taken that traffic leaving the subnet complies with the restrictions of the larger net, not just those of the cooperating subnet.
A "message ID" is a unique identifier for an article, usu- ally supplied by the posting agent which posted it. It dis- tinguishes the article from every other article ever posted anywhere (in theory). 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 relayer that straddles boundaries between different methods of message exchange. The most common type of gateway connects newsgroup(s) to mailing list(s), either unidirec- tionally 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 con- taining control information; a relayer 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).