How do moderated discussions work?
If you create a moderated discussion group, then any articles posted to
it (by non moderator users) are initially only visible to moderators and
the original poster. Once a moderator accepts the post then it is
visible to all other users. If any users choose receive instant messages
or email copies of articles posted to the group, then they only receive
the copy once the article has been accepted, except for moderators who
receive a copy when the article was first posted. Any articles posted to
the group by moderator users are automatically accepted.
If the discussion group is accessible via NNTP too, then you should
make sure you always either accept or delete every article, since
all articles posted after
any article that has not yet been accepted will not be
visible to NNTP users. (if we didn't make it work this way, then
if articles were accepted out of order, some NNTP clients would never
see articles accepted out of order.)
Additionally, NNTP users will not see their own
posts until they are accepted.
How exactly does the "Use direct connection if possible" checkbox in the Windows client work?
What happens is the first time it needs to connect to a
server it has not connected to before, it will use the proxy server for
that connection. However, it will also open a direct test connection and
a proxy test connection to the server too. If it successfully made the
direct test connection, then it records this information to disk and in
future will always use the direct connection in future, and even if a
direction connection fails in future, it will not ever try the proxy
connection again. However, if the test direct connection fails, and the
test proxy connection succeeded, it records to disk that it will always
need to use the proxy server for this server in future. If both tests
fail, it doesn't record any information and will try the tests again
next time.
In versions 2.0e and later, this information is stored in a file called
ProxyHosts.dat in the user's DBabble directory. Delete this file if
you want to clear the record of what servers require a proxy server.
Can I edit individual user preferences?
DBabble does not currently support administrators finding or modifying individual user preferences, although
we plan to add this in future. There is support for setting what default each preference should have,
and modify all existing users to use the default from the server administrator default preferences page.
Each user's preferences are stored in the text file info.dat in the user directory.
For example, users/u0/1/info.dat for user 1. Each line starts with a number of the preference followed
by the value. For a text description of what each number corresponds to, see the file prefs.txt in your
DBabble server directory. DBabble caches recently read preference files in memory for faster access
in future. If you want to modify a user preference value by editing the file, do a server reload command to clear the cache (dbabblesvr -reload)
To find which user has a particular preference value, (e.g. you want to find which user is forwarding
their instant messages to a particular email address) you can do the following on a Windows OS (it will be
slightly different on unix). Create a text file called
dbabblesvr/users/search_prefs.cmd
Which contains the line
@FOR /D %%x IN (*) DO @FOR /D %%y IN (%%x/*) DO @grep "%1" %%x/%%y/info.dat
In the dbabblesvr/users directory, type a line like:
search_prefs support-dbabble@netwinsite.com
which will then list the user-id of users whose preferences contain support-dbabble@netwinsite.com
