How do you get gnus to work?

gnus doesn't seem to work for me. I tried giving it a couple different servers in the GNUs config file, including textnews.news.cambrium.nl and news.gnus.org. The first one I've used before, through Lynx with the nntp:// scheme (not the news: scheme). When I try starting gnus, it gives the following error message:

Unable to open nntp:news.gnus.org, go offline? (y or n)

The code I put in my startup file was:

( setq gnus-select-method       '( nntp "news.gnus.org" ) )

I seriously doubt that that's the problem though, because gnus seems to be reading the server name just fine; it's just not able to find the server. Can anyone help me with this?

---------- Post updated 10-01-15 at 03:40 PM ---------- Previous update was 09-30-15 at 06:15 PM ----------

The URL was nntp:news.gnus.org. I think it's supposed to be nntp://news.gnus.org. Is this the problem? If so, how can I make gnus add the slashes in the script?

Well, it seems no one knows. Can anyone suggest a community where someone would know?