Yeah, I think these are more or less all Gnus issues; the buffers in question are Emacs buffers. I think it would work fine if sic.pm was my primary/only NNTP server, but in fact, it's my third. I don't have trouble posting to my other secondary news server (news.orbitalfox.eu), though; Gnus figures out that it's supposed to post there, not my default. There must be something that's tripping Gnus up here, so that it doesn't know where to post, but I'm now at a loss to figure out what it is.