Moderating Newsgroups

If you want to control what articles are posted to a newsgroup, you should use a moderated newsgroup. Articles submitted to a moderated newsgroup are not posted until they are approved by the moderator you have chosen for that newsgroup.

When a user submits an article to a moderated newsgroup, Microsoft NNTP Service sends the article to the newsgroup moderator. The moderator can either approve the article and send it back to Microsoft NNTP Service to be posted or discard the article. For discarded articles, the moderator can choose to send a message to the author of the article to explain why the article was rejected.

To use moderated newsgroups, you have to specify a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail server that is used to send articles to moderators or a directory where the articles are stored for the moderators.

You can also specify a default moderator domain. If you choose to use the default moderator for a newsgroup, articles are sent to newsgroup_name@default_domain.

To enable moderated newsgroups:

  1. Using either Internet Service Manager or Internet Service Manager (HTML), select the NNTP Settings property sheet.
  2. In the SMTP server for moderated groups box, either enter the Domain Name System (DNS) name or Internet Protocol (IP) address of the SMTP server or enter the path to the directory where articles are stored for the moderators. The directory path must be a local directory or a network directory mapped to a drive letter.
  3. In the Default moderator domain box, enter the e-mail domain for default moderators.
  4. If you specified an SMTP server, be sure that the user ID under which Microsoft NNTP Service is running (by default the System Account) is defined as an account on the SMTP server.

To create a moderated newsgroup:

  1. Using either Internet Service Manager or Internet Service Manager (HTML), select the Groups property sheet.
  2. Choose Create new newsgroup.
  3. In the Newsgroup box, type the name of the newsgroup you want to create.
  4. In the Description box, type a brief description of the newsgroup function.
  5. Choose either Moderated by default newsgroup moderator or Moderated by, and then enter the e-mail address of the moderator.

When moderators receive articles for moderated newsgroups, they mark the articles approved and send them back to Microsoft NNTP Service.

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