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    From hurst@21:1/5 to All on Fri Aug 26 05:11:54 2022
    How would I make a newsgroup that always sends out messages when a user
    logs in kind of like bulletins in a bbs? Something like updates or new
    users information. Would it be best to have a auto poster to post these messages say every week or first of the month?

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  • From Matija Nalis@21:1/5 to hurst on Sat Aug 27 01:21:03 2022
    On Fri, 26 Aug 2022 05:11:54 -0400, hurst <[email protected]> wrote:
    How would I make a newsgroup that always sends out messages when a user
    logs in kind of like bulletins in a bbs? Something like updates or new
    users information. Would it be best to have a auto poster to post these messages say every week or first of the month?

    Servers like INN implement "LIST MOTD" which is supposed to serve such message-of-the-day. However, many clients do not seem to use it.
    See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6048#page-13

    Other than that, few considerations if you decide to post it as a regular message
    (which might not be so great idea as it looks at first)

    - make sure it goes to your local group (and not some group distributed to other peers)
    - perhaps use (and allow it to work) Supersedes: header to replace old messages - make sure (via external means) that users actually follow that group and read messages in it.
    (that part is mostly a sociological, and not technical problem)

    (while there are technical ways to force users to read the message to access the NNTP server,
    I would not recommend them at all unless one feels to be BOFH)


    --
    Opinions above are GNU-copylefted.

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  • From hurst@21:1/5 to Matija Nalis on Fri Aug 26 20:20:01 2022
    On 8/26/22 19:21, Matija Nalis wrote:
    On Fri, 26 Aug 2022 05:11:54 -0400, hurst <[email protected]> wrote:
    How would I make a newsgroup that always sends out messages when a user
    logs in kind of like bulletins in a bbs? Something like updates or new
    users information. Would it be best to have a auto poster to post these
    messages say every week or first of the month?

    Servers like INN implement "LIST MOTD" which is supposed to serve such message-of-the-day. However, many clients do not seem to use it.
    See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6048#page-13

    Other than that, few considerations if you decide to post it as a regular message
    (which might not be so great idea as it looks at first)

    - make sure it goes to your local group (and not some group distributed to other peers)
    - perhaps use (and allow it to work) Supersedes: header to replace old messages
    - make sure (via external means) that users actually follow that group and read messages in it.
    (that part is mostly a sociological, and not technical problem)

    (while there are technical ways to force users to read the message to access the NNTP server,
    I would not recommend them at all unless one feels to be BOFH)


    Also in some examples of readers.conf what is the key option? how is it different from using the same name for the default identity and access
    name? Also I think as a personal choice you should be able to use the
    old nnrpd.access file or readers.conf not be forsed to use only one.
    Just my personal opinion. I personally found the sintax of that file to
    be better understandable than readers.conf.

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  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to hurst on Fri Aug 26 17:49:09 2022
    hurst <[email protected]> writes:

    Also in some examples of readers.conf what is the key option? how is it different from using the same name for the default identity and access
    name?

    key is primarily useful when you want to support more than one
    authentication system at the same time and their identity spaces may
    overlap. So you need to distinguish from, say, the Kerberos identity
    eagle and the PAM identity eagle and map them to different access rules.

    In other words, you probably don't need to use it. It's for fairly
    complicated authentication setups.

    Also I think as a personal choice you should be able to use the old nnrpd.access file or readers.conf not be forsed to use only one.

    readers.conf was in retrospect rather too complicated in its typical configurations, but it's hard to support more than one configuration
    system that does the same thing (particularly given how limited the
    resources for doing INN development are).

    That said, there is a script in contrib called nnrp.access2readers.conf
    and in theory you can write the nnrp.access file and then run that script
    on it and use the resulting readers.conf, and just repeat that process
    whenever you want to change something. (It doesn't support 100% of the
    syntax, though.)

    --
    Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

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