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Path: ...!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!newsfeed.bofh.team!newsfeed.xs3.de!nntp-feed.chiark.greenend.org.uk!ewrotcd!news.xcski.com!news.eyrie.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> Newsgroups: news.admin.hierarchies Subject: Usenet Hierarchy Administration FAQ Supersedes: <usenet-hier-faq-1710486062$31915@hope.eyrie.org> Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2024 07:01:03 -0000 (UTC) Organization: The Eyrie Expires: 20 May 2024 07:01:03 -0000 Message-ID: <usenet-hier-faq-1713164463$29303@hope.eyrie.org> Injection-Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2024 07:01:03 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: hope.eyrie.org; logging-data="29304"; mail-complaints-to="news@eyrie.org" Bytes: 32930 Lines: 594 Last-modified: 2018-07-16 Posted-by: postfaq 1.17 (Perl 5.36.0) Archive-name: usenet/hierarchy-admin URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/usenet-hier.html Posting-frequency: monthly This FAQ attempts to provide help to Usenet hierarchy administrators, the people who try to maintain the canonical lists of newsgroups in managed hierarchies. It is aimed at the hierarchy administrators rather than at news admins and tries to summarize the issues to consider in making it easy for news admins to carry the hierarchy. If you're reading this on Usenet, this FAQ is formatted as a minimal digest, so if your news or mail reader has digest handling capabilities you can use them to navigate between sections. In rn variants, you can use Ctrl-G to skip to the next section; in Gnus, press Ctrl-D to break each section into a separate article. Please send any comments, suggestions, or updates to eagle@eyrie.org. Bear in mind when sending me e-mail that I receive upwards of 800 mail messages a day and sometimes have a large backlog of personal e-mail. This FAQ is posted monthly to news.admin.hierarchies, and is available on the web at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/usenet-hier.html>. ------------------------------ Subject: Contents 1. Introduction and Terms 2. Basic Hierarchy Administration 3. PGP-Signing Control Messages 4. Maintaining Moderated Groups 5. About the ftp.isc.org Newsgroup Lists 6. Other Resources ------------------------------ Subject: 1. Introduction and Terms This FAQ assumes a basic familiarity with Usenet (there are other documents that explain the fundamentals better), but there are a few additional concepts that are specifically important for Usenet hierarchy administrators. A Usenet hierarchy is, reduced to its essence, a set of Usenet newsgroups that share a common naming prefix, such as all groups starting with "comp." or all groups starting with "de.". The names of Usenet newsgroups define a hierarchy of names, with "." used as the separator between the levels of the hierarchy, like host names. Unlike host names, the most significant part of the name is given first. The first component of the name is special and more significant than the rest of the name, since it defines the top-level Usenet hierarchy to which that group belongs. Generally, every top-level hierarchy is completely independent of the others (although there are a few exceptions where multiple hierarchies share the same management procedures). How the list of newsgroups in that hierarchy should be maintained varies very widely between hierarchies, from the complete anarchy of alt.* to the highly formal system used by comp.*, or simply by fiat of the organization running the hierarchy as with microsoft.*. Which maintenance methods you should use for your hierarchy is out of scope for this FAQ; this document is about how to publish the results of those methods, assuming that you want to have a single canonical list of newsgroups that everyone carrying that hierarchy can agree on. If you don't want that (if your hierarchy is like alt.*, for example), most of this document will not apply. Usenet newsgroups are created and removed via specially formatted messages called control messages that tell news servers to do something. A hierarchy should have a hierarchy administrator who is responsible for following whatever procedures were agreed on for changing the list of groups in that hierarchy and then publishing the results using control messages. The structure of control messages is explained in the Usenet news standards and in many FAQs and web pages, so it won't be explained here. (Some sites don't use control messages for various reasons, and it's therefore best to also publish the results via other methods, as will be explained.) Besides newgroup (create a newsgroup) and rmgroup (remove a newsgroup) control messages, there is also a control message called a checkgroups which provides a complete list of newsgroups in a hierarchy complete with short descriptions. A "checkgroups" is therefore also used to mean a complete list of newsgroups in a hierarchy. The checkgroups format is a list of groups, one per line, with the name of the group, a tab, and a short description. If the newsgroup is moderated, the description must end in the literal text " (Moderated)". (Sadly, you can't translate the word to another language. It's an ugly wart on the protocol.) Originally, control messages were authenticated only by the (easily forged) address of the sender of the message, which worked when Usenet was small but broke down badly as it got larger. As a result, most hierarchies now sign their control messages using PGP, an open standard for public key cryptography, allowing receiving sites to verify that the control message was issued by the person it claims to be from. ------------------------------ Subject: 2. Basic Hierarchy Administration A hierarchy administrator has three separate audiences who should be kept in mind when publishing information about a Usenet hierarchy: users who may be interested in reading or posting to the hierarchy, news administrators who are not currently carrying the hierarchy on their servers and want to, and news administrators who are already carrying the hierarchy and want to keep current with changes to it. The most important audience is probably the users, but that's also the audience that's the hardest to make general statements about, since how you communicate with potential users varies quite a bit by hierarchy. The users will primarily be interested in a description of what the hierarchy is for, a list of groups in the hierarchy, any hierarchy-wide policies, the charters of the newsgroups, and the newsgroup creation procedure. They'll generally speak the same language as the hierarchy (since if they don't, they probably won't be interested in reading it). News administrators who aren't currently carrying the hierarchy likely won't be as interested in detail like particuliar policies or group charters, but will also be interested in the overall purpose for the hierarchy and any policies that specifically affect sites carrying the groups. They will specifically need the list of newsgroups in the hierarchy in checkgroups format, however, and preferrably as a plain-text file that they can download and feed into their news software. They'll also need instructions for processing control messages to pick up changes to the hierarchy, generally as an INN control.ctl fragment. Finally, news administrators may not speak the language of your hierarchy (they may be running a news server for a large international ISP, for example), so you may want to provide instructions specifically for news administrators in English if the language of your hierarchy isn't English. News administrators who are already carrying the hierarchy are mostly interested in being notified of changes to it (usually via control messages). They also want ways of checking their group list against the current one so that they can get back into sync if they've missed some updates. So, given that, here are a few specific recommendations: * Have a web site. Try to make sure that the URL for your hierarchy web site is stable and doesn't change, since the URL makes it into various FAQs and configuration files that live for years. Put all of the hierarchy information on the web site, and make sure that the web site stays up to date. <http://www.news-admin.org/> may be available as a hosting site for your web site. * Every time you create a group, remove a group, rename a group (which can be done with a creation and removal), or change the moderation status of a group, send the appropriate control message. By looking for it in <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/> under your hierarchy, you can check that the control message has propagated. Control messages should have, in the Newsgroups header, the group being created or removed (even for newgroup messages; they'll propagate correctly even though the group hasn't been created yet because newgroup messages have special propagation rules). The exception is checkgroups messages, which should normally be posted to the administrative group of your hierarchy and possibly crossposted to news.admin.hierarchies. Don't put a Distribution header in your control messages unless you really intend to limit the availability of the groups to sites configured to accept that distribution (which mostly doesn't work anyway). * Send a checkgroups control message periodically. If you do this, you don't really need to send duplicate control messages for changes; if someone misses a change, they'll catch it with the next checkgroups message. In the checkgroups control message (and ideally in your other control messages as well), include an X-* header pointing to your hierarchy web site so that people can get more information about the hierarchy. Do not put a Supersedes header on your checkgroups messages; some sites will filter out any message that contains both a Control header and a Supersedes header. * Put the *current* checkgroups on your web site as a plain-text file (ending the file name with .txt will give this hint to most web servers) so that it can be easily downloaded by news administrators. Make sure that this file is kept current. Having a separate pretty HTMLified list of groups is often useful for users, but please be sure to provide the plain text checkgroups message as well since the HTML version is nearly useless for news administrators trying to add your hierarchy. * Write a guide for news administrators on how to carry the hierarchy, including an overall description. Make sure that it clearly indicates where to find the checkgroups for the hierarchy. Put this guide on your web site, and it doesn't hurt to put a URL for it in the headers of your control messages as well. If your hierarchy uses a language other than English, write this guide both in that language and in ========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========