newsproxy is a proxying news server, meaning that it doesn't actually maintain any information locally - everything it gets is off of other news servers. This is useful for several reasons, the most obvious of which is to allow a user to read news off of more than one server at a time. As different servers contain different groups, this is important.
Other benefits:
-
Allows non-NNTPAUTH capable news readers to connect to NNTPAUTH enabled news servers.
-
Allows the same newsgroup to be read on two different news servers, allowing users to choose their filtering policies more carefully.
-
Allow for overview-only feeds to allow users to share their idea of what a given group should look like. (Not currently supported by any servers, but it'd be interesting)
-
Allows for fast access to "local" articles, even on remote and slow servers.
-
Offers a framework to add additional news services, such as a news cache.
Depends on newslib.