Technical summary:
This document describes the operational procedures involved
in running the NetNews service, including the roles of all
the components of the service. It establishes terminology and
expectations of behaviour for News servers independent of the
protocol they use to communicate.
This, together with draft-ietf-usefor-usefor, obsoletes RFC
1036.
Working group summary:
The USEFOR working group has been working on this document in
various versions since 1998. This version was split from
the -usefor document in 2004. Progress has been slow, and
contention has erupted over both major and minor matters.
The group is now down to a very small size (~5 people), and
it is not believed that working at this longer will improve
the document significantly.
The WG has consensus that this document is a far better
specification than RFC 1036.
Protocol quality
The specification allows major News implementations to claim
conformance as-is. Some innovations done in the course of the
WG's work have been incorporated into existing News servers.
The editor is himself a News server implementor.