i was thinking earlier today about how annoying it is that none of the (non-gui) newsreaders i've tried have a decent interface for handling groups from multiple news servers. (none of the gui-based ones i've seen do much better, but i'm really not interested in a gui newsreader to begin with.)
then i remembered that i have the guts of an nntp server written in perl that i was already planning to overhaul to use an sql backend for the overview storage, and realized with some additional elbow grease, it could probably be turned into an nntp proxy, too. it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to leave the door open for using mbox files as the news spool, too.
just what i needed, another project.