Usenet,and newsreaders supported be OpenBsd

[PapaParrot]

I am wondering if anyone here uses "USENET". My experiences with it ,37 years ago were good, but when I started using WWW,html,and my first website, I drifted away fromthe USENET.
Recently ,decided to try it,and find it has changed considerably. Besides that ,my experiences were limited to DOS,and older UNIX servers,so I am still comfortable with
"TIN",to some extent,and I tried a GUI package, called 'pan' , a package is available for OpenBsd,. But anyway I
am wondering if any one has additional suggestions, for news readers,and also perhaps hosting services,I looked at a few, but not very impressed, one that I tried,it turned out they do not even support OpenBsd,(that was not surprising) but also they do not support using tin, ....so scratch that one,any one suggest others ?
If any one even uses USENET at all any more,... thanks

[stanl]

When I was into USENET I found slrn to be pretty good. Of course that was about 10 years ago. Haven't touched it since.
As for hosting services, Panix offers shell login access to their Unix hosts (running NetBSD I believe). I used Panix for quite a few years. I only dropped them because Apple offered more storage space for a lot less money.
Althought, I have been thinking of joining again.

https://www.panix.com/

[jggimi]

There are 17 Usenet News applications in the Ports tree. I have no opinion about -- or knowledge of -- any of them.

[TronDD]

I use tin.

I don't know what you're looking for from "hosting services" but I found a few free news servers to connect to. Most don't allow binaries, though.

https://news.solani.org/

A lot of people seem be on ES
http://www.eternal-september.org/

I use this one as there is no registraton but a 40 post per day limit instead
http://news.aioe.org/

[PapaParrot]

Thanks every one,
The news aloe org turned out to be perfect for what I need... thanks

[PapaParrot]

TronD

I use tin.

I am wondering, do you know if it is possible to configure tin so that it uses a different editor ? For example Joe, as editor, From what I read in the manual , it appears the editor is built in, and there is not any way, but I could be missing something.
Thanks

[Sehnsucht94]

As a fairly active NNTP user, I tried many clients over the years, and finally settled on slrn, as overall it seemed the most reliable, as well as the one with the right compromise between simplicity/lightweight and features availability. I don't attend Usenet any longer, if we exclude mailing lists mirrors, which always come in handy. I'm subscribed and to a couple of small, not relayed, invite only communities, where I enjoy having some productive/stimulating, relaxed and respectful debate, in old good netiquette vibe. One is orbitalfox.eu.
I'll attach my ~/.slrnrc^[1] which is configured to store news inside a local spool on my home server for offline reading and quicker startup (no need to fetch headers remotely). I have a cron job to fetch new entries run every 5 min (I'll attach that too). The configuration also includes a custom theme and some more settings not documented in the slrnrc sample file which comes bounded with the distribution, which you may be interested in.

^[1] file extension changed to upload it here, credentials and personal data removed

[jmccue]

Originally Posted by PapaParrot

I am wondering, do you know if it is possible to configure tin so that it uses a different editor ? For example Joe, as editor, From what I read in the manual , it appears the editor is built in, and there is not any way, but I could be missing something.
Thanks

When I read the manual for tin I see you can set the editor

Search for EDITOR, that will determine which editor to use

[PapaParrot]

Ok, I do see this:

POSTING ARTICLES
tin allows posting of articles, follow-up to already posted articles
and replying direct through mail to the author of an article.

Use the Post ('w') command to post an article to a newsgroup. After
entering the post subject the default editor (i.e., vi(1)) or the
editor specified by the $VISUAL or $EDITOR environment variable will be
started and the article can be entered. To crosspost articles simply
add a comma and the name of the newsgroup(s) to the end of the
''Newsgroups:'' line at the beginning of the article. After saving and
exiting the editor you are asked if you wish to a)bort posting the
article, e)dit the article again or p)ost the article to the specified
newsgroup(s).

====

After
entering the post subject the default editor (i.e., vi(1)) or the
editor specified by the $VISUAL or $EDITOR environment variable will be
started and the article can be entered.

But where is the $EDITOR environment variable ? If you don't want to just tell me clearly, yes, I can do some more searches later and maybe eventually find it, ... Thanks for the hint any way, it does sound like that can be changed.
=========== edited =======
Never mind , I found it,...
See next post
=========== edited again =========
@Sensucht94 , Thank you very much, I was just reading about slrn , those configuration files may come in handy, thanks

[J65nko]

EDITOR is an environment variable like PATH.

$ env | grep EDITOR
$
$ EDITOR=$(which vi) ; export EDITOR
$ env | grep EDITOR
EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi

This is how to set it manually. For repeated use of this variable, you can set it in one of the shell configuration files like .profile

[PapaParrot]

Ahh , Thanks, I just now found out the instructions in the link I posted did not work ,..thank you very much...
====edit=========
got it working,thanks again