This is supposed to be an archive of the Doom newsgroups, particularly the ones dealing with editing and hacking. At the moment, there is only rec.games.computer.doom.editing for 1999 (with about 20% of the articles missing).
Aha ! The embarrassing question. For Unix users, it's simple. Get the mailbox-format archive, decompress it and view it in a threading mail client like Mutt :
$ gzip -d rgcde-1999.mbox.gz $ mutt -Rf rgcde-1999.mbox
Et voilà :
If the articles appear in chronological order, you can switch to threaded mode by typing [o][t].
If for some reason you absolutely want to browse the archive with a newsreader instead, get the news-spool-format archive, extract it in an appropriate directory and convince your newsreader to view that. It's probably a lot more work than using a mail client.
For users of Unix-unlike operating systems (Windows, MacOS or whatever), try feeding the mailbox-format archive to a mail client that understands plain old mbox format. I believe that some versions of Eudora do. I don't know about Outlook Express but, knowing Microsoft's propensity to ignore existing standards, I would not count on it. If all else fails, you can browse the archive with a text editor but it won't do the threading.
Please don't ask me questions like "will it work with mailer X ?" or "how do you get it to work with newsreader Y ?" because I have no idea. If you manage to make it work with your software, write up a little guide and I'll post it here.
Here's what's in store :
What's the difference between mailbox format and news spool format ? The mailbox format is a single huge file with all the articles concatenated in chronological order. The news spool format is one file for each article. To decide which one is best for you, see the "how to use" section.
Careful, these files are big (about one MB).
If you have saved articles of rgcd*, get in touch with Len Pitre and me. Help us complete the archive. Don't bother formatting or sorting it : just send us what you've got, our scripts will sort it out.
The archives were converted from news spool format to mailbox format by a script like this one, run from the news spool directory :
#!/bin/sh
grep -l '^Date: .* 1999 ' * |
while read f
do
echo 'From x@x Mon Jan 1 00:00:00 GMT 1999'
cat "$f"
echo
done