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
