Down the rabbithole #gnus #nntp #feedbase #lantern
An innocent question about a warning from Gnus on Reddit led me down a rabbit hole: "Unexpected error message when starting Gnus".
My Gnus didn't show that warning message. Why? Because I had
gnus-read-active-file set to nil. Reading the Gnus
manual makes
it abundantly clear that the default 'some is superior to nil, so I
changed to that.
Now I also get the error, once for Feedbase, once for Lantern and once for each of my email (nnml) servers. Hm.
The error is because those servers don't support "LIST NEWSGROUPS". It turns out that I never implemented "LIST NEWSGROUPS" in Feedbase and Lantern - because I had configured Gnus in a way so it didn't issue it in the first place!
So I implemented "LIST NEWSGROUPS" in Feedbase's nntpd and in Lantern's nntpd.
Ok, good, now I have an answer: I only get those messages for my email servers.
With the changed configuration of gnus-read-active-file Gnus now
issues a "LIST NEWSGROUP" at start-up and displays descriptions in the
*Group* buffer. I actually don't want to see the descriptions, so I
changed my gnus-group-line-format to not include %D. This also has
the nice side effect that "LIST NEWSGROUPS" is no longer issued at
start-up and the warning isn't shown for the (remaining) servers that
don't support it. So now I also have a suggestion on how to avoid the warning.
Add comment
How to in excruciating detail…
To avoid spam many websites make you fill out a CAPTCHA, or log in via an account at a corporation such as Twitter, Facebook, Google or even Microsoft GitHub.
I have chosen to use a more old school method of spam prevention.
To post a comment here, you need to:
- Configure a newsreader¹ to connect to the server
- Open the newsgroup called
¹ Such as Thunderbird, Pan, slrn, tin or Gnus (part of Emacs).koldfront.dkon port1119using nntps (nntp over TLS).lantern.koldfrontand post a follow up to the article.Or, you can fill in this form: