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Moderating Newsgroups in IIS 6.0

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

If you want to control what articles are posted to a newsgroup, you should create a moderated newsgroup. Articles submitted to a moderated newsgroup are not posted until they are approved by the moderator you have chosen for that newsgroup.

Note

Microsoft recommends having a moderator for every newsgroup, especially if users outside your organization are allowed to make postings on your server. A moderator can filter inappropriate material and he or she can detect if someone is trying to compromise information on the server or compromise the server itself.

When a user submits an article to a moderated newsgroup, the NNTP service sends the article to the newsgroup moderator. The moderator can either approve the article and send it back to the NNTP service to be posted or discard the article. For discarded articles, the moderator can send a message to the article's author to explain why the article was rejected.

Any NNTP client can be used to post messages to a moderated newsgroup. However, the moderator needs to use an NNTP client that supports moderating functions.

To use moderated newsgroups, you must specify either a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail server for sending articles directly to the moderators or a directory where the articles are stored for the moderators.

You can also specify a default moderator domain. If you choose to use the default moderator for a newsgroup, articles are sent to newsgroup_name@default_domain, where newsgroup_name is the name of the newsgroup (the periods have been replaced by underscores). For example, articles posted to the newsgroup rec.sports.tennis, with a default domain of contoso.com, are sent to rec_sports_tennis@contoso.com.

Important

You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to perform the following procedure or procedures. As a security best practice, log on to your computer by using an account that is not in the Administrators group, and then use the runas command to run IIS Manager as an administrator. At a command prompt, type runas /User:Administrative_AccountName "mmc %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\iis.msc".

Procedures

To enable moderated newsgroups

  1. In IIS Manager, expand the local computer, right-click the NNTP virtual server, and then click Properties.

  2. On the Settings tab, in SMTP server for moderated groups, type the DNS name or the IP address of the SMTP server, or type the path to the directory where articles are stored for the moderators. The directory path must be a local directory. You should normally set this value to the pickup directory of the SMTP server. By default, this directory is localdrive\Inetpub\Mailroot\Pickup.

  3. On the Settings tab, in Default moderator domain, type the e-mail domain for default moderators.

  4. Click OK.

  5. If you specified an SMTP server, be sure that the user ID under which the NNTP service is running (by default, the System Account) is defined as an account on the SMTP server.

To create a moderated newsgroup

  1. If necessary, create the newsgroup. After you finish the New Newsgroup Wizard, the procedure is the same for both new and existing newsgroups.

  2. In IIS Manager, expand the local computer, expand the NNTP virtual server, and then click Newsgroups.

  3. In the details pane, right-click the newsgroup that you want, and then click Properties.

  4. On the General tab, select the Moderated check box.

  5. In Moderator, type the e-mail address of the moderator, or click Set Default to use the default moderator.

  6. Click OK.