Editing C News (section)

{{no footnotes|date=January 2013}}
{{About|the software package|the French TV channel|CNews}}
'''C News''' is a [[news server]] package, written by [[Geoff Collyer]], assisted by [[Henry Spencer]], at the [[University of Toronto]] as a replacement for [[B News]]. It was presented at the Winter 1987 [[USENIX]] conference in [[Washington, D.C.]]

Functionally, the operation of C News is very much like that of B News.  One major difference was that C News was written with [[porting|portability]] in mind.  It ran on many variants of [[Unix]] and even [[MS-DOS]].  The ''relaynews'' program that handled article filing and feeding was carefully optimized and designed to process articles in batches, while B News processed one article per program invocation.  The authors claimed that ''relaynews'' could process articles 19 times as quickly as B News.

In 1992, Collyer gave C News a new index facility called NOV (or News Overview).  This allowed newsreaders to rapidly retrieve header and threading information with relatively little load on the server.  Virtually all {{As of|2004|alt=current}} news servers continue to use this method in the form of the [[Network News Transfer Protocol|NNTP]] [[XOVER|XOVER command]].  Development of C News stopped about 1995, and the package was largely superseded by [[InterNetNews|INN]].