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For years or decades even, CTAN announcements of any package update/changes is send to comp.text.tex all the time.

On Feb 17, 2022 they suddenly stopped.

If you go to https://groups.google.com/g/comp.text.tex, and then click on the second page, you will see the last post there on Feb 17. Here is direct link to the last one.

I use thunderbird and view comp.text.tex via nntp.aioe.org which is convenient.

enter image description here

Why did this happen? And will it resume again or is it permanent?

Update

I guess based on the answer below someone was forwarding all these announcements for years to comp.text.tex and now they stopped but nothing changed in CTAN to cause this?.

I do not know how they managed to do this since the headers of the posts all indicate they were ctan-ann@ctan.org? Any way, too bad to see these stop. Here is header of the last post so you see it looks like they were generated from CTAN directly.

Path: aioe.org
From: CTAN Announcements <ctan-ann@ctan.org>
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: CTAN update: nicematrix
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:44:35 +0100
Organization: news2.open-news-network.org
Lines: 36
Message-ID: <mailman.759.1645116288.3195.ctan-ann@ctan.org>
Reply-To: ctan-ann@ctan.org
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
To: ctan-ann@ctan.org
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=ctan.org; s=201703;
X-BeenThere: ctan-ann@ctan.org
X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23
Precedence: list
List-Id: CTAN Announcements <ctan-ann.ctan.org>
List-Unsubscribe: <https://lists.dante.de/mailman/options/ctan-ann>,
 <mailto:ctan-ann-request@ctan.org?subject=unsubscribe>
List-Archive: <https://lists.dante.de/pipermail/ctan-ann/>
List-Help: <mailto:ctan-ann-request@ctan.org?subject=help>
List-Subscribe: <https://lists.dante.de/mailman/listinfo/ctan-ann>,
 <mailto:ctan-ann-request@ctan.org?subject=subscribe>
Xref: aioe.org comp.text.tex:64618

....


Thanks for the upload.


 For the CTAN Team
Petra Rübe-Pugliese






CTAN is run entirely by volunteers and supported by TeX user groups.
Please join a user group or donate to one, see https://ctan.org/lugs
Nasser
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  • did you post this query to comp.text.tex? – Mico May 23 '22 at 04:40
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    @Mico 1) I do not think the issue is related to comp.text.tex, it is CTAN issue no longer posting. 2) comp.text.tex has no activities to speak of. almost all posts were from CTAN and all the Latex experts who would know have long left and moved here. If I ask there, no one will probably read my question. I get faster answers in this forum. – Nasser May 23 '22 at 06:30
  • I am not surprised. I thought Usenet had died years ago … – Ingmar May 23 '22 at 07:05
  • The mail itself has been sent by CTAN. This is what you see in the mail headers. The only thing which is unclear to me is the Xref header. I guess that aioe.org has a mail-news gateway which generates the id. Afterwards the message has been propagated between the news hosts...without leaving any sign in the mail headers. – Gerd Neugebauer May 24 '22 at 17:07
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    @GerdNeugebauer Perhaps there is a connection between the non-appearance of CTAN announcements on comp.text.tex since February 17 and the death of Robin Fairbairns on February 25? – Ulrich Diez May 24 '22 at 17:17
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    @UlrichDiez I don't think so. Robin has been inactive for CTAN and the TeX world for some years. He has been ill for some time and away from University... – Gerd Neugebauer May 24 '22 at 17:28
  • @GerdNeugebauer Yes. In my perception of the TeX community, it was an incisive date. Maybe that's why my associations are playing tricks on me. Even though it has nothing to do with the issue raised in the question, I would still like to say that Robin Fairbairns' way of dealing with people's questions in comp.text.tex helped a lot in keeping my faith in the good in people. – Ulrich Diez May 24 '22 at 18:11
  • @Nasser wrote that comp.text.tex "has no activities to speak of". Today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Kuhn_(computer_scientist) wrote with a query about LLNCS style and got a helpful response from Dan Luecking. – Jonathan Fine Jun 08 '22 at 16:27
  • @Nasser Hopefully CTAN normalized now – MadyYuvi Dec 11 '23 at 14:08

2 Answers2

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The announcements from CTAN are primarily sent to the mailing list ctan-ann (https://lists.dante.de/mailman/listinfo/ctan-ann).

I guess someone has subscribed to this mailing list and forwarded the posts to comp.text.tex. On the CTAN side nothing has been changed.

In addition the announcements can be read via an RSS feed in Atom format or in RSS2.0 format; see https://ctan.org/ctan-ann

Gerd Neugebauer
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7

Holger Schieferdecker informed via the usenet-newsgroup comp.text.tex that forwarding of CTAN announcements to usenet/comp.text.tex is restored.

Google Groups URL: <https://groups.google.com/g/comp.text.tex/c/Ntas5HsXHz4/m/E-2XSA-KBwAJ>

Quote of the relevant parts of the message:

Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Why do CTAN announcements no longer show at comp.text.tex?
Date: Tue, 31 May 2022 09:07:28 +0200
Message-ID: <t74er8U3rckL1@news.in-ulm.de>

[...]

As you can see the announcements can be seen here again.

I contacted CTAN and suggested to use a different newsserver for the mail-news-gateway as the one used until now (news2.open-news-network.org) is currently down. This is the answer from Erik Braun from CTAN:

"Sorry for the late response, I was away for a few days. Now news6.open-news-network.org is used. Please let us know if there are problems again."

I'm not on StackExchange, so I can't answer there.

Holger

Ulrich Diez
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