Each Usenet site needs to keep a different list of newsgroups, Large
ISPs try to carry as many groups as possible in order to satisfy all
their customers. In contrast some companies may carry only a couple of
groups directly relevant to their business.

If your site is running INN (the most popular and mature of the
current Usenet News Servers) the list of what groups your site is
aware of is contained in the "active" file. Note that this may not
correspond with what groups are feed to it by other sites, for example
I have 3500 groups listed in my active file but I am only fed about a
hundred.

One of the problems that many News Admins face is keeping their active
file up to date. If your active file is out of sync with what is
generally accepted then you face the risk that your users may miss
articles that are posted to groups you do not carry. Alternatively
your users may post to a group that most sites don't have or post to
the wrong group as they unable to find the correct one.

However with over 30,000 newsgroups in existence and dozens being added
or deleted each day it is difficult and time consuming to manually
process every newgroup and rmgroup message that arrives at your site.

One option is to pick a site that you trust and grab their active file
at regular intervals, syncing your site to theirs each time (with the
odd differences like local groups).

In v1.5 and greater of INN the programs actsync and actsyncd can be
used to sycronize your active file with another sites file.

If people are interested I will look at adding useful config files for
these commands as well to this FAQ (suggestions and feedback encouraged).


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