RumorMill Help

General Help

Network settings

Max clients

This value limits the number of simultaneous clients (news readers) that may connect to your RumorMill server.

Max number of active newsfeeds

The number of simultaneous connections by news feeds sending articles to your server is limited by this value. Note that some news servers may attempt use multiple connections. Active newsfeeds may impact the responsiveness of your server to clients reading news.

Server Port

Port 119 is reserved for the network news protocol (NNTP) and is the default setting. Other ports may be used, but care should be taken to make sure that you are not selecting a port number used by another (active) protocol on your server. Note that if you change the port number, you must restart RumorMill for this change to take effect.

Administration Port

This is the port specified for connecting to RumorMill with a web browser to administer RumorMill preferences. Note that if you change the port number, you must restart RumorMill for this change to take effect.

Disconnect idle clients after...

If a client does not interact with the server for a period time, RumorMill will close the connection with the client. Setting this value to zero (0) will allow clients to remain connected and inactive indefinitely. It is a reasonable practice to set this value to something like 10 or 20 minutes.

Host naming

Host path name

This is an optional setting and in general should be left blank. The Host path name may be used when you do not have a DNS entry for your current IP address. The value of this field is used in the "Path:" header when articles are added to your database.

NAT Host Name

This is an optional setting and in general should be left blank. The NAT Host Name may be used in cases where your news server is running behind a NAT or firewall. In such cases it may be desirable to have your server claim to have a name that can be found in DNS outside your NAT or firewall. Note that this value will be ignored if the value provided cannot be found via a DNS look up.

Help note

This value will be returned to clients issuing a HELP command to RumorMill. The help note is appended to the end of the normal list of commands supported by RumorMill. The help note is limited to 250 characters

Basic server settings

Enable Streaming for Forwarding of articles

Streaming is an alternate mechanism for moving articles between news servers. Streaming is more efficient than the normal mechanisms but is not supported by some news servers. This setting allows RumorMill to attempt to use streaming when sending articles to another news server. Note that streaming on send to a news server will not work if your server is not peered with the remote news server - that is, you have made arrangements with the administrator of the remote server to accept articles from your server.

Enable Streaming for Receive

Streaming is an alternate mechanism for moving articles between news servers. Streaming is more efficient than the normal mechanisms but is not supported by some news servers. This setting allows you to decide whether your server will support articles being streamed from a remote server. If you do not allow streaming, the normal means of moving articles will be used. In either case, you must arrange with the administrator of the remote news server to have articles sent to your server. Otherwise you must use the PULL mechanism described elsewhere.

Hide the "control" group from users

RumorMill has a default newsgroup named control that is used to handle control articles (creating and deleting groups, killing spam articles, etc.). The control group is often hidden from clients. This setting allows the administrator to hide the control group from client users.

EMail nightly statistics to System Administrator

Enabling this preference will cause nightly statistics to be EMailed to the administrator. Other preferences (see the SMTP host and Sys Admin Email address) must be properly configured for this setting to work.

EMail Group changes to System Administrator

Enabling this preference will cause EMail to be sent to the administrator regarding the automatic creating and deletion of newsgroups. Other preferences (see the SMTP host and Sys Admin Email address) must be properly configured for this setting to work.

EMail control messages to System Administrator

Enabling this preference will cause EMail to be sent to the administrator whenever articles are received that would create or delete newsgroups. This allows the administrator to review these requests and then manually permit or deny the actions of these control articles. Other preferences (see the SMTP host and Sys Admin Email address) must be properly configured for this setting to work.

Enable detailed logging

From time to time it may be useful to have additional information to debug a problem with your RumorMill installation. Enabling this preference cause RumorMill to log additional information as it operates. If you enable this option, you may need to adjust the setting limiting the size of a log file so that logged information is not lost too quickly.

Enable Server mode (no modal dialogs)

Certain operations that RumorMill performs require that dialogs be presented to the user. In some cases these dialogs must be modal (blocking other operations while active). In other cases they need not be modal. When enabled, this preference causes any dialog that can be to be non-modal.

Limit use of IHAVE to newsfeed hosts (recommended)

Normally use of the IHAVE part of the NNTP protocol is limited to remote news servers configured in the Newsservers segment of RumorMill preferences. It is possible to allow any connecting client to add articles via the IHAVE protocol. This is strongly discouraged because adding articles in this way may by-pass some of the checks that prevent propagation of SPAM articles.

Only forward local postings (recommended)

Only articles posted by clients should be forwarded to remote news servers. However, there may be odd circumstances where it is desirable to pull articles from a server and then forward those articles to another server. Disabling this preference would support this situation. Disabling this preference is strongly discouraged.