USENET in Russian

The situation here is not as complicated as with
mail
because news readers use a different protocol, namely NNTP,
and do not requite sendmail. If you are using TIN
or XRN you are Ok. You don't have to do anything except
allowing 8th bit go through and loading fonts (see other sections
of
"How to russify your software").
However, I must warn you about several things:
- Relcom is a RUSSIAN SPEAKING world wide hierarchy.
Please, do not use English there. If you send an article in English,
there is no grantee that it will get a response, although
because many people know English well enough someone may
actually reply.
- Please, try to use normal Cyrillic when writing articles there.
It's very hard to read a Latin junk when an article is written
to match sounds of Russian words with Latin letters. Sometimes people
just won't look at this kind of articles. Please, respect someone who
will read what you are writing.
- Just a reminder: do not put any commercial information in
groups other then relcom.commerce.*.
- There can be an access problem. In other words, Relcom
groups may not be accessible everywhere. Ask
your USENET guru about it. If you do not have the newsgroups
on your local news server, you can get them without any problem --
just ask. There is no need to contact Relcom
news servers to get newsgroups! If you really wish to do it
directly, send a message with a single line "HELP" to
newsserv@newcom.kiae.su and the server will explain how
to subscribe to the groups but be aware that you will get your
mailbox full with a junk -- the traffic is really heavy. In this
situation you will need a
clean sendmail, as you do things by hands.
- There may be a Distribution problem: not all articles may
be accessible for the whole World because an author may have wished
to limit the distribution -- it's a feature of NNTP. It is
relevant to any newsgroup in the USENET, though.
More or less
"up-to-date" list of Relcom newsgroups can be
found here, on
sunsite.oit.unc.edu. I update it periodically: once a month.
You can get the newest one sending a line "LIST relcom.*" as a message
to the Relcom's central news server newsserv@newcom.kiae.su.
Note: If you are interested in Ukrainian newsgroups, they are
broadcasted to Relcom and USENET as well. Send "LIST ukr.*"
to the same server newsserv@newcom.kiae.su to get a list. These
groups use Ukrainian language as an "official". They have a slightly
different way of representing characters, as there is some
difference between the two languages. Ask there for details. I think
Ukrainians will "live over" if you write them in Russian asking how
to do it in Ukrainian :-).
Note: fido7.* newsgroups are not currently broadcasted to
the whole USENET because the traffic is really heavy and backbones are
overloaded. Wait until new better links will be on-line. You could, read
these groups on Russian servers, though.