Features

The News Gizmo is:

• Powerful:
  It has the power to make you completely Usenet-II sound, and to make your users better Usenetizens in general.
  • It can send them rules documents for posting to certain hierarchies. It can block them from posting to these hierarchies either indefinately or until you grant them permission.
  • It can make it impossible for them to encourage cross-hierarchy flame wars, or post a message to more than a certain number of newsgroups.
  • It can ensure that they don't send more than a certain amount of messages out in a day.
  • It can make sure that they don't post between mutually exclusive hierarchies (e.g. net.* and !net.*).
  • It can store data in a user database that exists indepentantly of the current news-reading process.
    • Some of the data in this database gets refreshed every 12 hours, while some stays in permanently.
    • Post filters have full access to the data in this database, and can update it as they see fit.
    • A locking mechanism is used so that the user can't circumvent any filters relying on database data by opening several connections to the server at once.
• Configurable:
  Very few files or directories used by the package are hardcoded into the package, and all extension modules have an API for configuration directives.
  • Posting limits, or crossposting, or any other kind of limit can be configured on a per-user basis.
  • You can lump several users together into a group, and have limits apply to all users in that group.
    • User groups can be defined by set operations on other user groups and on individuals
  • Limits for an individual user can be declared in seperate lumps. Once a valid limit for a user is encountered, it does not get reloaded.
• Attractive:
  The spam.limit file is case insensitive, and can be as heavily commented or as sparse as the maintainer desires.
  • Every provided filter is defined with a few aliases, usually including at least one whole english word which describes the functionality of the filter.
  • Declarations can be split across several lines and whitespace and comment lines are completely ignored.
• Simple:
  After deciding which filters you want to apply, the system will almost take care of itself. It will send mail on any errors or exceptional conditions (e.g. the user has posted more than their slowthresh, and their posts now merit additional attention), and will notify the user of the reason it blocked their post.
• Extensible:
  This package has a small API for:
  • post blocking and tracking
    • Every user has three entries in a database for posting summaries in the AM and PM and data that doesn't get refreshed.
    • The values for a user's entry in a database contain data for each kind of post checker that stores data persistantly.
    • Only data relevant to the post checker is passed along to the post checker.
    • No restrictions (except that parentheses must match) are placed on the format of values in the database.
  • identifying users
    • Gizmo-level support for different user domains or namespaces
    • The nnrp.access file has its format changed to allow for multiple user resolution/authentication schemes.
      • User domains can have a default or be overridden depending on the syntax used in the nnrp.access file.
      • Can reference an external file for authentication schemes.
      • Always matches against the hostname and IP-address of the remote host (the standard nnrpd does not).
      • Can identify a user with or without a password.

And, of course, it's free! The license is loose, so there's virtually no reason you should not be running this package on your news server.