46448 - Subscribe to newsgroup without needing it to be a listed newsgroup

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[James Green]

A newsserver may be configured not to 'publish' all the newsgroups it carries.
Some ISPs keep the 'adult' groups from the GROUPS command, and some educational
establishments keep the entire alt.* heirachy as well as other non-academic
trees away. Netscape 4 and mozilla both only permit subscriptions to newsgroups
it 'knows' about from the list the server gives out.

Functionality is required to subscribe to ANY newsgroup that is manually typed
in, with no check as to whether it exists. For example, I should be able to type
in alt.something.weird and subscribe to it even if my newsserver doesn't give it
in it's list of available groups - that server may well still carry it.

I found out Outlook permits this - a support request was mailed to my ISP's
support newsgroup asking how to access the alt.sex.[somethingorother] group,
they responded that such groups are withheld and can be subscribed to in Outlook
be typing their name in rather than selecting them from the list. This should be
available in Mozilla too - it can't be that hard to implement, right?

Comment 1

[scottputterman]

moving to future milestone.

Comment 2

[Jean-Marc Desperrier]

This would not aske for a lot of work :
- The functionnality was there in M15, when there was only a subscribe dialog
and not window, and no room to display the newsgroups.
- There is a work around : See bug 11075
You can access this newsgroups and get subscribed to them by typing in a
navigator windows the url : news://my_server/my_unpublished_newsgroup

Comment 3

[Karen Huang]

*** Bug 38141 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

accepting all "future" bugs to get them off my "new" bug radar.

Comment 5

[laurel]

mass change of huang's news bugs to stephend.

Comment 6

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** Bug 59508 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[David E. Ross]

Thunderbird version 1.5.0.8 (20061025)

This should also apply to Thunderbird.  

Using Thunderbird, I recently tried to subscribe to a new "Big-8" newsgroup.  My NNTP service is with Gigabit, which carries over 100,000 newsgroups.  It took many minutes to refresh the list of newsgroups available from that account.  (As about half of those who access the Internet in the U.S., I use a dial-up modem.)  When the list was refreshed, the newsgroup was not on the list.  

I was finally able to subscribe by creating a Web page with a news:// link to the group.  This should not be necessary since many users don't even know how to create a Web page.