ietf-nntp Re: [NNTP Draft] 11. Other keywords

[Russ Allbery]

Andrew Gierth <andrew at erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:

>           11.3 NEWGROUPS

>             NEWGROUPS date time [GMT|UTC]

[...]

>             The date is sent as 6 or 8 digits in the format [XX]YYMMDD,
>             where XX is the first two digits of the year, YY is the last
>             two digits of the year, MM is the two digits of the month
>             (with leading zero, if appropriate), and DD is the day of
>             the month (with leading zero, if appropriate). If the first
>             two digits of the year are not specified, the year is to be
>             taken from the current century if YY is smaller than or
>             equal to the current year, otherwise the year is from the
>             previous century.

This seems an ill-advised rule in the presence of clients that may have
slightly bogus clocks.  If it's actually 23:50, December 31st, a client
may well send a date in the next year, and the server would then return
all newsgroups on the system.  I think there should be a wider margin used
here.

>             Note that an empty list (i.e., the text body returned by
>             this command consists only of the terminating period) is a
>             possible valid response, and indicates that there are
>             currently no new newsgroups.

The term "new newsgroups" seems underspecified, and in practice clients
should be aware that the list may not be comprehensive (in particular,
date ranges which predate the start of operations of that particular news
server are unlikely to result in correct returns).

>           11.4 NEWNEWS

>             NEWNEWS newsgroups date time [GMT]

>             A list of message-ids of articles posted or received to the
>             specified news group since "date" will be listed.

news groups, plural.

>           11.4.2 Examples
>             Example where there are new articles

>                     [S] 200 NNTP Service Ready

>                     [C] NEWNEWS news.*,sci.* 19990624 000000

>                     [S] 230 list of new articles by message-id follows

>                         <i.am.a.new.article at nowhere.to>

I recommend following the convention used in the USEFOR draft and using
either the .example TLD or example.{com,org,net} in all examples of this
sort.  Just in case.

nowhere.to may well be a valid domain.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>