How to participate in fido7 newsgroups

What do you need to read postings?

• You need to understand written Russian.
• You need to have Cyrillic fonts installed on your computer.
• You need to have an NNTP user agent or other way to access newsgroups.
• You need to have read access to an NNTP server that carries fido7 hierarchy.
• If native Cyrillic codetable on your computer is not the one used on the Net (koi8-r, RFC-1489), then you need a way to convert text to your codetable (translation proxy server, translating NNTP server) or have koi8 fonts installed of your computer. Some modern news user agents are capable of translating koi8 into into encoding native for the platform. To learn more about the use of Cyrillic on the Internet see Andrew Chernov's KOI8 guide.

What do you need to post articles?

• You need to write in Russian
• You need to have Cyrillic fonts and Cyrillic keyboard map installed on your computer.
• You need to have an NNTP user agent or other way to access newsgroups.
• You need to have a valid reachable address in the From: header set up in your news agent.
• You need to have write access to an NNTP server that carries fido7 hierarchy.
• If native Cyrillic codetable on your computer is not the one used on the Net (koi8-r, RFC-1489), then you need a way to convert text to your codetable (translation proxy server, translating NNTP server) or have koi8 fonts and koi8 keyboard map installed of your computer. (Note: many modern news user agents have ability to translate Cyrillic text to/from koi8 when sending/receiving but they often do it in a wrong way). To learn more about the use of Cyrillic on the Internet see Andrew Chernov's KOI8 guide.
• You need to ensure that 7bit encoding (quoted-printable or base64) is not used when posting.

How you know that things go right?

• You are reading articles in the newsgroup(s).
• You post a first article.
• You get automated reply with registration instructions (3 part MIME message).
• You follow instructions and send registration request message.
• You get automated notification about successfull registration.
• You repost your first article and/or post new articles.
• You get people's response and enjoy :-)

What can go wrong and what you can do about it?

• You do not see any fido7 newsgroups on your server.
  • Ask your ISP to subscribe to fido7 hierarchy.
  • Change ISP.
  • Find a server with fido7 hierarchy that would allow you in.
    See list of public servers.
• You can read articles, but when you try to post, the server would not allow it.
  • Ask your ISP to let you in.
  • Change ISP.
  • Find a server with fido7 hierarchy that would allow you in.
    See list of public servers.
• You post an article and it appears in the newsgroup but you never get automated reply from the gateway and no people outside your news server see it.
  • The newsgroups are improperly configured at the news server. Ask your sysadmin to configure fido7 newsgroups in accordance with the instructions on http://www.fido7.org/.
• You send registration request but in response you get "not registered yet" message and another magic number. When you register with the new magic number, you still cannot post as you get "not registered yet" message with the first magic number.
  • You have different From: addresses in your mail and in your articles. You need to send registration request from the same address as you have in the news articles.
• You where posting normally but at some moment you started to get automated response that the article was not posted.
  • See the reason in the automated response. Often it will explain what happend.
• Things do not work right and the problem is not covered above.
  • Contact the human operator at <gatekeeper@fido7.org>