Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!twwells!bill From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: Moderated newsgroups Message-ID: <1989Sep23.101824.15001@twwells.com> Date: 23 Sep 89 10:18:24 GMT References: <1245@sas.UUCP> Distribution: usa Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL Lines: 38 In article <1245@sas.UUCP> sasdvp@sas.UUCP (David V. Phillips) writes: : When posting to a moderated newsgroup, is it generally better to post to : the newsgroup, or mail to the moderator. If it is better to mail to the : moderator, how does one find out who the moderator is? (I'm specifically : looking for the rec.guns moderator.) If you can post to a moderated newsgroup (assuming your software isn't broken and that you haven't lied to the software with an Approved: line), it gets mailed to the moderator for you. In which case, just post. If posting to a moderated newsgroup gets your message rejected immediately, send e-mail. With a few exceptions, you can send e-mail to the moderator by mailing to a mail alias maintained on a so-called (for historical and now irrelevant reasons) "backbone" site. A site I might use is uunet; to mail to comp.sys.sun, I could send to uunet!comp-sys-sun. The list of "backbone" sites is available, as are the real addresses for moderators, in monthly postings in one of the news.all newsgroups, I'm not sure which. (maybe news.lists, news.announce.newusers, news.admin, or news.misc). If you know where the news library directory is (maybe /usr/lib/news but I've never been on a system with a standard news setup so I wouldn't know), a file "mailpaths" in it may contain a line like "all uunet!%s" or "backbone uunet!%s"; if so, one of those would give you the method of constructing the right mail alias. But, then again, if you have that file, your software probably does this for you anyway.... : Separately, what is the name of the file that contains the different : distributions available on a machine? In that same news library directory you might find a file "distributions". --- Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill bill@twwells.com