Newsgroups: Technical discussions at HREF Tools Corp.

In February 2022, HREF Tools launched a discussion forum using Discourse on Linux hosted by AWS. The initial support categories are Rubicon and WebHub.

You are very welcome to participate. forum.href.com

We were using newsgroups over NNTP to provide technical support for these products: WebHub, Rubicon and IIS Backup.

Newsgroup Names

The available newsgroups were

• hreftools.public.announce
• hreftools.public.rubicon.support
• hreftools.public.rubicon.install
• hreftools.public.webhub.support
• hreftools.public.webhub.install

General Advice on NNTP Connectivity

Embarcadero provides a very helpful overview here, Article #38435. This article explains, among other things, how to use XanaNews to connect to Delphi newsgroups and other public newsgroups hosted by Embarcadero. Look for the section titled Newsgroup Reader Configurations.

XanaNews - Settings

If you have trouble reading messages, go into Account Properties > Dialup & Connection and turn off XOVER and possibly turn off pipelining. The number of connections is probably not important, you can keep the default value.

Exit and restart XanaNews between major changes to the connection settings because you can get different results, using the same settings, after a restart of XanaNews.

If you have trouble downloading ALL our newsgroup messages with XanaNews, try downloading just headers and then, if you are interested in any particular message, click into it to download that particular message. That will be quicker for you, and is much more likely to work.

Thanks to Peter Hyde at WebCentre in New Zealand for the XOVER, etc. advice.

XanaNews - Message Order

Sometimes it helps to see messages as threaded conversations. Sometimes it helps to see just the newly added ones. To toggle between these, go into Tools > Options > Default Settings > Sorting and Threading.

Alternative NNTP Clients

There are many alternatives to XanaNews, including Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook. Wikipedia lists more than a dozen.

NNTP Server - Credits

Many thanks to Steffen Wendzel, the author of the open-source NNTP server behind news.href.com. We ran the win32 version for many years, and moved to CentOS7 in March 2015. You can find the original C language source code for WendzelNNTPd-OSE on Source Forge.

Updated Monday Mar. 14, 2022