Hi,

I'm wondering for years about the default value for the
gnus-group-posting-charset-alist variable.

| gnus-group-posting-charset-alist's value is
| (("^\\(no\\|fr\\)..." iso-8859-1 (iso-8859-1))
|  ("^\\(fido7\\|relcom\\)..." koi8-r (koi8-r))
|  (message-this-is-mail nil nil)
|  (message-this-is-news nil t))
|
| Alist of regexps and permitted unencoded charsets for posting.
| Each element of the alist has the form (TEST HEADER BODY-LIST), where
| TEST is either a regular expression matching the newsgroup header or a
| variable to query,
| HEADER is the charset which may be left unencoded in the header (nil
| means encode all charsets),
| BODY-LIST is a list of charsets which may be encoded using 8bit
| content-transfer encoding in the body, or one of the special values
| nil (always encode using quoted-printable) or t (always use 8bit).
|
| Note that any value other than nil for HEADER infringes some RFCs, so
| use this option with care.

Is it still necessary not to encode text by qp or something to
post news articles to no, fr, fido7 and relcom newsgroups?  I
don't use Norwegian, French or Russian, so it isn't my business,
though.

As for other newsgroups, Gnus forces the 8bit encoding especially
to news articles' body by default.  Isn't it a vestige of the
time when Gnus had not been multiligualized?  It is hard for me
to imagine there's a difference between mail and news.  What I'd
like to say is: let's change the default value to:

(message-this-is-news nil nil)

Almost Japanese text which I write can be encoded by iso-2022-jp
and 7bit.  So, those text will be posted as 7bit articles.
However, I sometimes followup to articles containing characters
which cannot be encoded by 7bit.  In those cases, text will be
encoded by shift_jis, utf-8 and so forth and fed to the server
without being encoded with qp or base64.  A newsreader posting
such articles may be only Gnus nowadays.  Therefore, I make it a
rule to recommend Japanese users to modify the value as follows: