Network News Transport Protocol
charter-ietf-nntp-01

This group will study and review the issues involved with netnews
transport over the Internet. Originally released as an RFC in
February of 1986, NNTP is one of the most widely implemented
elective protocol. As of this writing, the protocol has just
passed its fifth birthday, and has not been updated once.

Over the years several enhancements have been suggested, and several
have even been widely implemented. The intent of this working group
will be to encode the more popular and plausible enhancements into an
Internet standards-track protocol. Included in the initial list of
changes to be considered are the following:

(1) User level and site designated authentication methods;

(2) Binary transfer capability;

(3) Minimization of line turnaround; and

(4) Stronger article selection capability.

It is expected that public domain software will be released
concurrently with an RFC, demonstrating the protocol enhancements.