On this page, you will find links to more webpages and resources that may be of interest to users of the slrn newsreader. We check each link before we add it, but we will not always notice immediately when a website referenced here moves or disappears. If you find a dead link or know of a site that is not yet listed here, please be sure to let us know.

Usenet resources

Newsgroups on slrn / slang

news.software.readers: This newsgroup deals with all kinds of newsreaders, so please put "slrn" somewhere into the "Subject:" header line to make your posting easy to find for other slrn users. The newsgroup is read by both slrn's author, John E. Davis, and its current maintainer, Thomas Schultz. alt.lang.s-lang: This newsgroup deals with the s-lang macro language that can be used to extend and customize slrn. Discussions on macros for slrn tend to be cross-posted into news.software.readers. de.comm.software.newsreader: This newsgroup corresponds to news.software.readers, but is intended for discussions in German language. The maintainers of this site frequently read it and answer questions there. If you prefer English, please use news.software.readers - we will see your posting there as well. fr.usenet.logiciels: Corresponds to news.software.readers, but discussion is in French. I do not read this group myself, though.

Obtaining a copy of slrn

Please see the section on where to get slrn on our main page for a list of links.

slrn documentation

setting up slrn

Introduction to Usenet News and the slrn Newsreader: This extensive document (114 kB) is divided in three parts: The first one gives an overview on what Usenet is, the second one is a tutorial for slrn's basic functionality and the third one deals with advanced topics like searching and scoring. If you are looking for a manual, try this! Originally written for trn by Jonathan Bell, re-written to cover slrn by Sylvain Robitaille. HOWTO use slrn with leafnode (plain text): This document is written by Christian Kuester. He told us that he'd appreciate feedback on it. slrn under Windows: David Gerard gives a step-by-step guide on how to get a recent version of slrn to work under Windows 95/NT. Configuring slrn for BeOS: A step by step description put together by Scot Hacker. Building slrn on Mac OS X: A brief note and patch by Felix Schüller. Quick introduction to slrn (German): Short instructions on how to read your news with slrn. By Gerfried Fuchs. Eddie's Debian Configuration Site - slrn: Brief German description of slrn's features and an English sample .slrnrc file. Written by Eduard Bloch. Sample setup: slrn with Windows (German): A brief description on how Michael Klingbeil ran slrn on a Windows 2000 box. Installing slrn and leafnode on MacOS X (German): Step by step instructions on how to install both programs from sources on Mac OS X (Jaguar). Written by Jens Kutilek. HOWTO use slrn and slrnpull (Italian): Describes how to install, configure and use slrn for offline newsreading with slrnpull. Also includes an Italian translation of the official FAQ. Written by Alessandro Airaghi.

reference documentation

The available reference documentation can be found on our docs page.

Add-ons for slrn

Macros

jbn's S-Lang macros: Some really useful macros written by J.B. Nicholson-Owens. automatic scoring: This macro set provides a basic implementation of ``adaptive scoring''. It automatically generates scorefile entries based on what articles you read or replied to and comes with a simple script that automatically purges old entries. Written by Robin Sommer. assorted macros (on our site): Some macros written by Thomas Schultz. tsca's s-lang page: Quite a few macros for slrn as well as some related macros for the editor jed. Written by Tomasz `tsca' Sienicki. Emmanuele Bassi's page on slrn contains some useful macros, including GnuPG support (sign and verify articles using the GNU Privacy Guard or PGP) and a macro that allows you to change your identity depending on the newsgroup in a flexible way. Message-Id browser: Displays a list of all Message-Ids in the current article and allows you to fetch the associated posting from your news server or the archive at google groups. Written by Thore Tams.

External scripts and programs

Cleanscore (on our site): Purges expired scorefile entries. slrn and PGP: A perl script and a set of macros by René Scholz to use PGP 2.6.* with slrn. slrnface: A small C program and a set of macros to display X-Faces in slrn (requires X11). Written by Drazen Kacar. Note: The original homepage of slrnface is currently not online, so I uploaded to most recent tarball to our data directory. However, the author is still working on that tool and will put up a new webpage for it along with the next release. slrnconf: A graphical frontend for the configuration of slrn, written in Perl/Tk by Torsten Schoenfeld. newsq: A program that allows you to view and edit postings that are still in the outgoing queue. Works with slrnpull or NNTP servers that keep a batch file for outgoing messages (like INN/rpost). Written in C by Tony Houghton. spellutils: The spellutils package by Byrial Jensen contains the program newsbody, which isolates the article headers from the body, runs a filter program (e.g. a spell checker) on the body and merges the parts again. Utilities for running slrn on OS/2, collected by Francesco Cipriani. t-prot: A perl script that does its best to fix misformatted messages. The distribution includes a macro that can be used to call t-prot automatically on each article. Written by Jochen Striepe.

Patches

Jurriaan's patch set: Jurriaan W Kalkman wrote a bunch of patches, both, for slrn and for slrnpull. The most prominent of them are the ability to download articles from multiple groups in parallel, making full use of the available bandwidth, and ``persistent scoring'', i.e., the possibility to score articles based on their ancestors in the thread.

Relevant RFCs

The folks at tin.org have a nice page with links to all relevant standards and drafts. I do not see any point in duplicating their work.