Messages on the CTAN announcements list have in the past been automatically fed to the usenet group comp.text.tex. Early in August that went out. We are glad to announce that we are back on ctt with the help of Kaja Christiansen.
For comp.text.tex readers: the announcements list is your chance to hear about packages that are newly installed and packages that have received major upgrades, as well as occasional administrative information. To see which ctan-ann messages you have missed since the outage started, visit http://lists.dante.de/pipermail/ctan-ann/2006-August/thread.html . To subscribe to the list or to read the archives, visit http://lists.dante.de/mailman/listinfo/ctan-ann .
Sorry about the outage, Jim Hefferon for the CTAN team