MODERATORS(5)

💌 MODERATORS(5) — moderators 💌

okay so bestie, this is the section 5 manual page for moderators from the InterNetNews documentation — literally the glow-up guide for moderated-group submission addresses 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

moderators — submission addresses for moderated groups

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

When an unapproved article gets posted locally to a moderated newsgroup, it does not get passed off to innd for normal handling. Instead, it gets sent via e-mail to the submission address for that newsgroup — and this configuration file is how that submission address gets determined. ✨

The file at pathetc/moderators is like a matchmaking list: uwildmat patterns matching newsgroups get paired with the submission address for those newsgroups. Blank lines are ignored, and lines starting with a number sign (#) are also ignored — slay, comments. All other lines should consist of two fields separated by a colon:

<pattern>:<address>

The first field is a uwildmat pattern matching the group or groups to which this line applies. The first matching line is used, so more specific patterns should be listed before general patterns.

bestie, order matters fr fr: first matching line wins, so put the specific patterns before the general ones 👑

The second field, the submission address, should be a simple e-mail address with one exception: at most one %s may occur anywhere in the address. If present, it will be replaced by the name of the newsgroup, with all periods in the name changed to dashes (-). If there is a literal % in the submission address, it must be written as %%, even if not followed by an s. 🎀

With the %s syntax, periods are converted to dashes for historical reasons, from back in the days when periods in the local part of addresses were not always handled correctly. It’s probably no longer necessary, but so much now depends on it that it can’t be easily changed. 😭

It’s intended that the sample moderators file included in the INN distribution always be sufficient for all world-wide newsgroups. The hosts behind moderators.isc.org have graciously volunteered to handle forwarding tasks for all world-wide newsgroups so that individual sites don’t have to keep track of the submission addresses for moderated groups. The forwarding database used by moderators.isc.org is coordinated by <moderators-request@isc.org>; if you know of a world-wide newsgroup hierarchy that is not correctly handled by moderators.isc.org, please send the details to that address. 🫶

Given that, the only thing you should have to add to the sample file under normal circumstances are the forwarding addresses for local or limited-distribution moderated groups. 💅

If this file doesn’t exist, or if a post is made to a moderated group that has no matching entry in this file, nnrpd falls back on the value of moderatormailer set in inn.conf and, failing that, rejects the post. no cap. 💀

🧪 EXAMPLES 🧪

Here is a sample file:

example.important:announce@example.com
example.*:%s@smtp.example.com
*:%s@moderators.isc.org

Using the above file, postings to the moderated newsgroup in the left column below will be sent to the address shown in the right column below:

example.important   announce@example.com
example.x-announce  example-x-announce@smtp.example.com
alt.dev.null        alt-dev-null@moderators.isc.org

Note that periods are changed to dashes and dashes are left alone with the %s syntax, so two moderated newsgroups whose names differ only by changing a period to a dash would go to the same address. Such newsgroup pairs should therefore not be created. 🚨

📜 HISTORY 📜

Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Rewritten in POD by Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>. iconic behavior, honestly 🎀

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

inn.conf(5), libinn_uwildmat(3), nnrpd(8).

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💖 that’s the whole vibe, bestie — this page is from INN 2.7.4, dated 2025-03-29. bye bestie! 💋