How To Configure Newsgroups to Be Moderated in Windows

This step-by-step guide describes how to configure newsgroups to be moderated.

How to Moderate Newsgroups

Articles that are submitted to a moderated newsgroup are not posted until they are approved by the moderator for that newsgroup. When a user submits an article to a moderated newsgroup, the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) service sends the article to the newsgroup moderator. The moderator can then either approve the article and send it back to the 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.

Any NNTP client can be used to post messages to a moderated newsgroup. However, the moderator must use an NNTP client that supports moderating functions.

To use moderated newsgroups, you must specify either a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail server for sending articles directly to the moderators or a folder where the articles are stored for the moderators. You can also specify a default moderator domain.

If you use the default moderator for a newsgroup, articles are sent to newsgroup_name@default_domain, where newsgroup_name is the name of the newsgroup (the periods have been replaced by hyphens). For example, articles that are posted to the rec.sports.tennis newsgroup with a default domain of myserver.com are sent to rec-sports-tennis@myserver.com.

How to Enable Moderated Newsgroups

To enable moderated newsgroups:

1. Start Internet Services Manager.
2. Right-click the NNTP server you want to have moderated, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Settings tab.
4. In the SMTP server for moderated groups box, either type the Domain Name System (DNS) name or the IP address of the SMTP server, or type the path to the folder where articles are stored for the moderators. The folder path must be a local folder. You would typically set this value to the pickup folder of the SMTP server. By default, this is the Inetpub\Mailroot\Pickup folder.
5. In the Default moderator domain box, type the e-mail domain for default moderators.
6. Click OK.
7. If you specify an SMTP server, make sure that the user ID under which the NNTP service is running (by default, the System account) is defined as an account on the SMTP server.

How to Create Moderated Newsgroups

To create a moderated newsgroup:

1. If necessary, create the newsgroup after you finish the New Newsgroup Wizard. The procedure is the same for both new and existing newsgroups.
2. In Microsoft Management Console (MMC), expand the appropriate NNTP virtual server to display the Newsgroups node.
3. To display all of the NNTP virtual server's newsgroups in the Details pane, click Newsgroups.
4. Right-click the appropriate newsgroup, and then click Properties.
5. Select the Moderated check box.
6. In the Moderator box, type the e-mail address of the moderator, or click Set Default to use the default moderator.
7. Click OK.