The active file

newsgroup high low perm

At least, that's what the low field is meant to do. However, for efficiency reasons, C-News doesn't update this field. This wouldn't be such a big loss if there weren't some newsreaders that depend on it. For instance, trn checks this field to see if it can purge any articles from its thread database. To update the low field, you therefore have to run the updatemin command regularly (or, in earlier version of C-News, the upact script).

perm is a parameter detailing the access users are granted to the group. It takes one of the following values:

y

Users are allowed to post to this group.

n

Users are not allowed to post to this group. However, the group may still be read.

x

This group has been disabled locally. This happens sometimes when news admininistrators (or their superiors) take offense to articles posted to certain groups.

Articles received for this group are not stored locally, although they are forwarded to the sites that request them.

m

This denotes a moderated group. When a user tries to post to this group, an intelligent newsreader will notify her of this, and send the article to the moderator instead. The moderator's address is taken from the moderators file in /usr/lib/news.

=real-group

This marks newsgroup as being a local alias for another group, namely real-group. All articles posted to newsgroup will be redirected to it.

A file closely related to active is active.times. Whenever a group is created, C-News logs a message to this file, containing the name of the group created, the date of creation, whether it was done by a newgroup control message or locally, and who did it. This is for the convenience of newsreaders who may notify the user of any recently created groups. It is also used by the NEWGROUPS command of NNTP.