Good question. I had assumed they were provided as part of the newgroup
control message that creates a new group on usenet, but the rfc850 syntax
says that body of the message should be a short paragraph describing the
group rather than a single line as I expected.
For the big 8 newsgroups, the nan-moderator sends out a periodic posting
with the names and descriptions that can apparently be fed to a script
called 'checkgroups' which presumably comes with the newsserver and which
I assume updates the groups in accord with the message or at least points
out discrepancies.
>PS: ok, I've found the definition myself (in RFC977 Common
> Extensions). That means, it is no standard (common extension) and
> the last question remains: who's maintaining such a list?
Where is the doc on rfc977 common extensions? I've searched in the past
without success (when someone mentioned the XHDR command on this list).
I've always had to resort to using my newsservers online help.