ietf-nntp LIST ACTIVE issues

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Fri Mar 21 09:20:07 PST 2003


Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>>      y         Local postings are allowed
>>      n         No local postings are allowed, only remote ones

> Not clear what you mean by a "local posting" and a "remote posting".

>>      m         The group is moderated and all postings must be approved
>>      j         Articles in this group are not kept, but only passed on
>>      x         Articles cannot be posted to this newsgroup
>>      =foo.bar  Articles are locally filed into the "foo.bar" group

To rephrase all of these:

A mode of y means that all messages are accepted.

A mode of n means that messages from peers are accepted as normal, but
messages posted by local readers are rejected.

A mode of m means that messages from peers are accepted iff they contain
an Approved header, and local messages are forwarded to the moderator.

A mode of j means that messages from peers are accepted but filed into the
junk group rather than into a normal newsgroup.  From there, they can be
sent back out to other peers, but are only readable if readers are allowed
to read the junk group.  I believe that postings from reader clients are
also accepted (just filed into junk), but I'm not positive.

A mode of x means that no messages are accepted for the group at all.
This was a simple way of implementing crosspost filtering at the server
level before embedded filters were common.  If you wanted to reject all
messages to a particular group, even if they were crossposted to other
groups you normally carried, you could add the group with mode x to reject
all those messages.  This is mostly obsolete these days; it's better to do
that sort of filtering in an embedded filter so that the groups don't show
up in the active file.  (Although mode x groups do have the somewhat nice
property of exposing some of your filtering rules to the clients
directly.)

A mode of = with an associated group means that articles from peers that
would go into that group are instead filed into the associated group
instead, and local reader attempts to read or post to the group tend to
fail in bizarre and interesting ways.  Group aliasing isn't particularly
well-supported by INN right now.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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