I just went ahead and logged in to a machine where I had slrn installed, then signed up for an account with http://www.eternal-september.org/ and configured my .slrnrc with

   set force_authentication 1
   nnrpaccess news.eternal-september.org [user] [password]

then ran something like

  slrn --nntp -h news.eternal-september.org --create

and

  L*nethack

to select rec.games.roguelike.nethack

then do

  s "happy to ann"

to do a subject search going forward, then read the message.

Page down and up with space & b, etc.

It's been a little while since I used a newsreader and I didn't use to slrn, so took a few minutes to get used to.