The active file is located in
/etc/, and lists all groups known at your site
and the articles currently online. You will rarely have to touch it, but
we explain it nevertheless for sake of completion. Entries take the
following form:
newsgroup is the group's name.
low and high are the
lowest and highest numbers of articles currently available. If none are
available at the moment, low is equal to
high+1.
At least that's what the low field is meant to do.
However, for efficiency, C News doesn't update this field. This wouldn't be
such a big loss if there weren't newsreaders that depend on it. For
instance, trn checks this field to see if it can purge any
articles from its thread database. To update the low
field, you therefore have to run the updatemin command
regularly (or, in earlier versions of C News, the upact
script).
perm is a parameter detailing the access users are
granted to the group. It takes one of the following values:
- y
Users are allowed to post to this group.
- n
Users are not allowed to post to this group. However, the group may still
be read.
- x
This group has been disabled locally. This happens sometimes when news
administrators (or their superiors) take offense at articles posted to
certain groups.
Articles received for this group are not stored locally, although they are
forwarded to the sites that request them.
- m
This denotes a moderated group. When a user tries to post to this group,
an intelligent newsreader notifies her of this and send the article to
the moderator instead. The moderator's address is taken from the
moderators file in /var/lib/news.
- =real-group
This marks newsgroup as being a local alias for
another group, namely real-group. All articles
posted to newsgroup will be redirected to it.
In C News, you will generally not have to access this file directly.
Groups can be added or deleted locally using
addgroup and delgroup (see the
section Section 21.10” later in this chapter). A
newgroup control message adds
a group for the whole of Usenet, while a rmgroup message deletes a group.
Never send such a message yourself! For
instructions on how to create a newsgroup, read the monthly postings
in news.announce.newusers.
The active.times file is closely related to the
active file. Whenever a group is created, C News logs
a message to this file containing the name of the group created, the date of
creation, whether it was done by a
newgroup control message or locally,
and who did it. This is convenient for newsreaders that may notify
the user of any recently created groups. It is also used by the
NEWGROUPS command of NNTP.
