Moderating Newsgroups

If you want to control what articles are posted to a newsgroup, you should create 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 send a message to the article's author to explain why the article was rejected.

To use moderated newsgroups, you have to specify either a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail server for sending articles directly to the 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:

In either Internet Service Manager or Internet Service Manager (HTML), select the NNTP Settings property sheet.
In the SMTP server for moderated groups box, either enter the DNS name or the 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. You should normally set this value to the pickup directory of the SMTP server. By default, this directory is C:\Inetpub\Mailroot\Pickup.
In the Default moderator domain box, enter the e-mail domain for default moderators.
Choose OK.
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:

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