[news.admin] How do moderated groups work under c-news?

clarke@arnor.uucp (10/26/90)

As a result of the ddmi.com flamefest, I started looking at the c-news
software to see exactly what would happen if someone changed all the
moderated groups to unmoderated status on his own machine.  A quick
scan of the doc/notebook/man pages doesn't give any answers.

A quick scan of relaynews source seems to indicate that un-approved 
messages to a moderated group will be flushed and not passed on.  The
only place that mailpaths seems to be used is by the inews shell
script.  Is this correct?

If true, it seems that postings to moderated groups that have not been
approved will simply vanish as they reach C news sites.  I never did
see the comp.newprod message that started all this.

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (10/27/90)

In article <1990Oct26.152728.15427@arnor.uucp> clarke@arnor.uucp writes:
>A quick scan of relaynews source seems to indicate that un-approved 
>messages to a moderated group will be flushed and not passed on.  The
>only place that mailpaths seems to be used is by the inews shell
>script.  Is this correct?

This is correct.  In general, automatic mailing of articles that did
not originate on your site is a thoroughly bad idea.  There is too
much potential for it to happen in many places at once, as a lot of
moderators have discovered.

>If true, it seems that postings to moderated groups that have not been
>approved will simply vanish as they reach C news sites...

That's right.
-- 
The type syntax for C is essentially   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
unparsable.             --Rob Pike     |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry