cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

How do I link to an article from the old NNTP archive?

VolkerBarth
Contributor
0 Kudos
2,370

Since the old NNTP forums are long gone, and the according archive website nntp-archive.sybase.com has no builtin search facility, I follow Jason's advice to search within the archive, as discussed in Breck's blog article " The Newsgroups Are Gone".

That works well enough for my needs.

However, the displayed URLs look weird (or even invalid...) and cannot be used as links within this forum, as shown in that answer...

Similar strange links are shown (for me) when searching for the following keywords:

"passthrough mode" site:http://nntp-archive.sybase.com

So what must I do to receive an useful link to the archived articles?

VolkerBarth
Contributor
0 Kudos

Hm, this may be a temporary problem, apparently I had been able to use these links in this forum (though they contain brackets and at signs) without problems, as shown in this answer:

How to link to a newsgroup thread?

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

graeme_perrow
Advisor
Advisor

If you make the link using the Markdown syntax, it will work if you replace the < with %3C, > with %3E, and @ with %40. So the text of the article should look like:


Text with a [link to nntp][1]

[1]: http://nntp-archive.sybase.com/nntp-archive/action/article/%3C42d81576.5b5e.1681692777%40sybase.com%...


This looks like:

Text with a link to nntp

It also seems to work if you just include the plain URL itself. But for some reason, simply including the link in an <a href="url">text</a> does not work, presumably due to Markdown being too smart for its own good.

Former Member

Interestingly enough, this is coming from your web browser. The server passes an encoded URL (to W3C specs), which you can view in the page source.

A quick google search shows this isn't a unique problem. The most common suggestion is to put a "link to this page" button somewhere on the screen. I'll see if I can do that in the next revision.

VolkerBarth
Contributor
0 Kudos

I'm quite sure I have done that (i.e. replacing the relevant characters) within a comment on the cited answer - however, the trailing %3E do seem to be omitted from the link. Well, I will try again when the next chance to relate to the archives will show up:)

Answers (0)