If an article is posted to newsgroups not mentioned in this file, those newsgroups are ignored. If no valid newsgroups are specified, the article is rejected.
Each line consists of four fields specified by a space:
name himark lomark flags
The fourth field can contain one of the following flags:
y Local postings are allowed n No local postings are allowed, only remote ones 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
If a newsgroup has the ``j'' flag, then no articles will be filed into that newsgroup and local postings to that group should not be generated. If an article for such a newsgroup is received from a remote site, it will be filed into the ``junk'' newsgroup if it is not cross-posted. This is different from not having a newsgroup listed in the file because sites can subscribe to ``j'' newsgroups and the article will be propagated to them.
If the fourth field of a newsgroup starts with an equal sign, then the newsgroup is an alias. Articles can be posted to the group, but will be treated as if they were posted to the group named after the equal sign. The second and third fields are ignored. Note that the Newsgroup header is not modified (Alias groups are typically used during a transition, and are typically created with ctlinnd(8)). An alias newsgroup should not point to another alias.
The file /news/news/active.times provides a chronological record of when newsgroups are created. This file is normally updated by innd(8) whenever a ctlinnd ``newgroup'' command is done. Each line consist of three fields:
name time creator
The first field is the name of the newsgroup. The second field is the time it was created, expressed as the number of seconds since the epoch --- i.e., a time_t; see gettimeofday(2). The third field is the electronic mail address of the person who created the group.