This password allows remote administration of the RumorMill server. To prevent someone else modifying the settings of the server, the password should be set to a value that will make it difficult for someone else to guess. One good way of choosing a password is to think of phrase and use the first letter of each word of that phrase as the password. An example phrase might be Monty Python's ministry of silly walks makes me laugh would create a password that is mpmoswmml. For additional security, digits or other characters could be use to prefix or postfix the resulting password.
Sometimes articles are cross-posted to many groups. This is often a clumsy mechanism of spamming newsgroups. If an article received by RumorMill has more than this number of newsgroups listed, the article is discarded as SPAM.
Most news articles are fairly small, a few thousand characters at most. Occasionally people will attach large files to their postings. The system administrator may not wish to support such large articles because of limited disk space or other reasons. On the other hand, if binary postings will be carried by the RumorMill server, articles may be very large. In either case, this setting will limit the maximum size of articles posted to RumorMill. Any article larger will be discarded.
This setting can be used to limit how many articles are received each time a connection is established with a remote server. This can be useful limit how much processor time RumorMill consumes by breaking up connections over a longer period of time.
RumorMill checks to see that articles received have a recent posting date. Sometimes if the date is in the past or in the future, the articles are SPAM. This setting will limit this effect. A setting of 1 or 2 days can be reasonable for normal operation. However, if the RumorMill database is being initialize by getting articles from another server, the system administrator may wish to temporarily set this value to a relatively large value, perhaps 180, to allow older articles to populate the article database.
If this setting is selected, articles rejected for any reason will be appeneded to a rejected articles file. The reasons for rejection will also be writtent to the file.
Occasionally a remote newsfeed may send articles to your server that are to be posted to groups that do not exist on the local RumorMill server. With this setting selected, those group names will be logged so that the system administrator can decide if those groups should be added to the local server.
Articles, called control articles, can be received by RumorMill that direct the server to create or delete newsgroups. The system administrator can control how RumorMill responds to these control articles.
Option | Description |
Do Automatically | When a control article is received that would either create or delete an article, RumorMill will automatically perform the creation or deletion of the specified group. |
Administrator approves | With this option selected, RumorMill will save a list of pending group creation and deletion control articles. The system administrator may then review these control articles and individually choose which to implement and which to ignore |
Always ignore | With this option selected, control artilces that would create or delete news groups are always ignored. |
The system administrator may decide who has access to the RumorMill server. These login control options provide a coarse level of control over who and how users can use the RumorMill server.
Option | Description |
No login required | With this option selected, any user may connect to RumorMill to both read and post articles. |
Login always required | Using this option forces all users to login to either read or post articles to RumorMill. To use this option, the system administrator must also create users. See the Users section |
Login required to post articles | This option allows users to connect to read articles without login in. However, to post articles users must login. To create users, see the Users section |