RumorMill Setup Documentation
Newsfeeds are other NNTP servers where news articles come from, and are fed to. The Newsfeeds window lets you control whether news is fed to, received from, or pulled from specific hosts. It also allows you to specify the defaults for how often articles are fed to downstream newsfeeds, and how often they are pulled from upstream newsfeeds.
When you add a new newsfeed you are presented with a Newsfeed Entry window. Accept Articles From This Host determines whether RumorMill will let the newsfeed act as an upstream newsfeed. If this checkbox is not enabled RumorMill will reject attempts by this host to pass on articles.
The Active Pull feature makes RumorMill pro-actively connect to the host and pull articles down (as if it were a news client). Active Pull cannot be used unless Accept Articles From This Host is enabled. This is a useful feature if you cannot organize for the newsfeed to push feed news, or your RumorMill server is not on a permanent link.
Please note that if you wish to host a large number of groups (more than a couple of hundred) you should probably arrange to be Push fed. When RumorMill pulls groups it intermittently checks with the Newsfeeds to see whether new articles have arrived. This causes unnecessary load on both RumorMill and the the Newsfeed. (And a significant amount of network traffic when large numbers of newsgroups are involved.)
When you add a new newsgroup RumorMill Setup automatically assumes you want all newsgroups defined in the Newsgroups window Pulled. To change this default behaviour click on the Edit Group List button.
The Group List window allows you control over specific newsgroups on a newsfeed by newsfeed basis. On the left is a list of groups associated with the current Newsfeed, the Group List, and on the right is the Master List, a full list of groups as defined in the Newsgroups window.
You can 'move' groups into the Group List from the Master List using the '<<' button. You can also add patterns to the group list which will match more than one group using the asterisk ('*'), question mark ('?'), or exclaimation mark ('!'). For example, to match all groups in the alt hierarchy you could use the pattern:
alt.*
The question mark matches single characters. So the pattern:
al?.???
Would match with 'alt.sex', 'ala.aaa' and 'alt.six', but not with 'altt.aaa', 'alt.sixs' or 'blt.aaa'.
And:
!microsoft*,*
would not match any groups starting with 'microsoft', but then match any other group.
When you add a new group you can specify whether the server should Send the Group To the Newsfeeds, Exclude the Group From Being Received and Pull the Group From the Newsfeed. Note that this is a slightly different set of functions from the Newsfeed window, and it does not override the settings in the Newsfeed Entry window: if you do not have Pull enabled in the Newsfeed Entry window, no groups will be pulled even if they are marked as Pull in the Group List window.