active(5)

NAME
active - active newsgroups list

DESCRIPTION

The system's /usr/lib/news/active or /conf/news/active file holds the status of each news group that is active on the system. It is an ASCII text file with each line describing exactly one news group. The line format is:

NAME<SPACE>XXXXX<SPACE>YYYYY<SPACE>MODE

with NAME being the name of the news group, XXXXX being the 5-digit (10 digits on larger systems), zero-prefixed ASCII representation of the number of the article most recently received, YYYYY the number of the first article that has not yet been expired, and, finally, MODE is a single character describing the status of the news group. It can be either one of:

y - users may post to this news group

n - users cannot post to this group

m - this is a moderated news group

The first two modes are self-explanatory. However, the third mode (the moderated news group mode) deserves an explanation.

In some news groups (like official network management bulletins) it is often undesirable to have the network users post articles to that news group. However, it is also a hassle to keep changing the status from n to y each time an official announcement is posted. So, the original implementors of the NEWS system thought of the moderator-concept , which means, that there is only one person that can acually post articles to the news group (this person is called the moderator of this group). To the moderator, it looks like any other non-moderated news group.

However, when "ordinairy" people post an article to this news group, the NEWS system ultimately finds out that it is a moderated group, and it then uses a trick to get it posted...

The trick is, that the article is sent to the moderator of the news group by e-mail , thus allowing the moderator to first have a look at the article before he or she actually posts it. The WNEWS configuration file moderators (5) has a list that converts newgroups to email addresses.

To make the updaing of the active file as fast as possible (it is usually quite large, containing most if not all of the news groups available world-wide!), the file's contents are updated in place , which means that the file is not rewritten each time, but the programs simply modify some bytes in it. This is why the numbers have a fixed size of 5 digits (also 10 digits in larger NEWS installations), with the numbers being zero-prefixed. See the comments in the NEWS software sources for more comments on this. You may have to tweak the system to be able to get this updating to work properly!

A sample active file might look like this:

 mugnet.gov 00034.01030 y
 mugnet.maps 00006 00005 y
 mugnet.newgroups 00003 00003 y
 mugnet.sources 00048 00000 y
 mugnet.sources.d 00026 00019 y
 mugnet.talk 00124.01089 y
 mugnet.test 00158 00146 y

Again, note that this file usually is a lot larger than the example!

FILES
/usr/lib/news/active
/conf/news/active

AUTHOR
Fred N. van Kempen, waltje@Infomagic.COM

SEE ALSO
moderators(5)