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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On Fri, 26 Aug 2022 05:11:54 -0400, hurst <seth@home.sethhurst.com> 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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On 8/26/22 19:21, Matija Nalis wrote:

On Fri, 26 Aug 2022 05:11:54 -0400, hurst <seth@home.sethhurst.com> 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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hurst <seth@home.sethhurst.com> 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 (eagle@eyrie.org) <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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