NAME

       active.times - List of local creation times of newsgroups

DESCRIPTION

       The file pathdb/active.times provides a chronological record of when newsgroups were
       created on the local server.  This file is normally updated by mod-active and innd
       whenever a newgroup control message is processed or a "ctlinnd newgroup" command is
       issued, and is used by nnrpd to answer NEWGROUPS requests.

       Each line consists of three fields:

           <name> <time> <creator>

       The first field is the name of the newsgroup.  The second field is the time it was
       created, expressed as the number of seconds since the epoch.  The third field is plain
       text intended to describe the entity that created the newsgroup.  This field is encoded in
       UTF-8 and is usually the e-mail address of the person who created the group, as specified
       in the control message or on the ctlinnd command line, or the newsmaster specified at
       configure time if no creator argument was given to ctlinnd (by default, it is "usenet").

       You can get the active.times file of another NNTP server with getlist(1).

EXAMPLE

       The line:

          news.admin.moderation 1175716803 <group-admin@isc.org>

       shows that the newsgroup news.admin.moderation was created on April 4th, 2007, at 20:00:03
       UTC.  This date can be obtained for instance with "convdate -dc 1175716803" (convdate(1)
       is shipped with INN) or "date -u -d "Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 +0000 + 1175716803 seconds"".
       It is when the newsgroup was locally created; in this example, it is when a control
       message sent by "group-admin@isc.org" was received and processed by the news server (see
       control.ctl(5) for more details).  Therefore, the time is not necessarily the same on
       every news server.

HISTORY

       Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.  Converted to POD by Russ
       Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>.

SEE ALSO

       active(5), convdate(1), ctlinnd(8), getlist(1), inn.conf(5), innd(8), mod-active(8),
       nnrpd(8).