Instructions on Setup and Use of the Robomod

Contents

• Where to get HELP
• Initial Setup
  • Setting up a separate Unix account. [SYSADMIN]
  • Setting up sendmail aliases. [SYSADMIN]
  • Setting up procmail
  • Setting up PGP
  • Setting up Perl

• Starting With Robomoderator
  • Unpacking Source
  • Creating ../etc directory
  • Setting .profile for robomod support
  • Editing Data Files in ../data
  • Creating List for reasons of Rejection and Rejection Messages
  • Creating PGP keys.
  • Compiling C programs in ../c directory

• Testing Your Setup
  • Choosing a "victim" group
  • Things to Test
  • Testing individual moderators

• Maintenance of the Robomod
  • Maintaining preapproved list
  • Maintaining blacklist
  • Maintaining list of people not needing acknowledgments
  • "Vacationing" of moderators, maintenance of private mailing list for moderators.

• Upgrading Version of the Robomoderator

• STUMP-users mailing list.

  There is a mailing list for STUMP users. You can subsrcibe and ask your questions there. They will likely be answered within a day or two. To subscribe, send email to majordomo @ algebra.com and say in the message-body "subscribe stump-users".

  I do monitor that list and help you get your questions answered. The submission address for sending messages is stump-users @ algebra.com.

• Commercial installation services.

  For non-Unix people, I perform a service whereby I install STUMP on their system. I also provide them with a five month warranty, which means that if something breaks, I will be there to help.

  Note, however, that I encourage you to take the free route and do it by yourself, and am not trying to make a sale. Installing STUMP is almost always a useful experience.

Setting up a separate Unix account. [SYSADMIN]

Second, and more important, reason for having a separate account for personal work and robomoderator is security. Internet is a wild and dangerous place full of people willing to inflict serious harm on others just for the sheer fun of it. I have proofread and verified all moderation scripts for security, and built extensive protection against malicious attacks aiming to hack robomoderation account. However, I cannot give you a 100% assurance that robomoderation process is secure.

If you operate robomoderator from your private account and someone manages to hack it, all your private files will be open for prying eyes of people whom you do not even know. If it happens in an isolated account, the damage will be much more limited.

All in all though, you can get along with just using your Unix account.

If you do not have superuser privileges, you cannot set up a legitimate account. Please ask your system administrator to do it for you. A good name for such account would be comprised of first letters of your newsgroup name. For example, account for soc.culture.russian.moderated is called scrm@algebra.com (I am the sysadmin of algebra.com).

You may call the robomod's account csfm@yoursite.com.

Setting up sendmail aliases. [SYSADMIN]

• Accepts and checks incoming submissions
• Accepts approvals and rejections by human moderators
• Maintains moderators' private mailing list
• Forwards complaints of posters to all human moderators

Note also, that if you have only one address and a sendmail-based system, and a non-cooperative sysadmin, you can try to get around the requirement to have several sendmail aliases. If addresses like yourname+comment@yoursite.com work, then you can use addresses like "csfm+approved@yoursite.com" instead. Make sure that they do in fact work (it is not guaranteed) and then edit your stump/etc/procmailrc accordingly.

Setting up procmail

Procmail binary is provided for Linux and FreeBSD, see the main STUMP page for the reference.

Look at the sample .procmailrc file that is used by soc.culture.russian.moderated.

Setting up PGP

Set up and familiarize yourself with PGP, an excellent third-party encryption and authentification program.

Download it from this link. If you are not residing in the US or cannot download PGP from that page, try this link and try to find PGP there.

Another link (in Norway) is this: download PGP from Net sites outside.

PGP binary is provided for Linux and FreeBSD, see the main STUMP page for the reference.

Setting up Perl

Unpacking Source

Creating ..../etc directory

Go through files in etc directory, and edit them carefully.

Most of them are self explanatory. I put lots of comments in them. You should begin with editing the stump/etc/modenv file.

Create a symbolic links for procmail:

IMPORTANT: Later you MUST make sure that procmail processes all your incoming mail correctly and that all rules are written right. For logs of all procmail activity you may look into $HOME/Mail/from logfile. You can set VERBOSE=ON in the procmailrc file if you want to see detailed output.

NOTE: file Mail/from is an excellent source of debugging information.

Editing Data Files in ..../data

You can (and should) edit some of the files in the data directory. These files are good.guys.list, bad.guys.list, bad.words.list. They contain Perl's regular expressions for detecting messages from preapproved and blacklisted posters, and suspicious words, respectively.

Edit them and leave them blank (no spaces).

Setting .profile for robomod support

Put this in your .profile or .login file:

Creating ONE PAIR of PGP keys.

According to the specification of the robomod, you have to have one PGP key - for signing approved articles with PGP Moose application.

Pick a passphrase that is not too hard to type and remember. Usage of these PGP keys is not a very high-security application, so you can select 512-bit key sizes. Save this passphrase in file $HOME/.pgp-passphrase

. Make sure that this passphrase is not readable by anyone except the robomod user.

Name the key by analogy with the key used for SCRM (see modenv file and user names there). Your PGP Key must be named like this:

pub   512/ABB554F5 1996/02/26 CSFM Approval Key <csfm-approval-key@yoursite.com>

PGP Keys are generated using command

Compiling C programs in stump/c directory

Creating List for reasons of Rejection and Rejection Messages

These messages will be sent to users when their articles are rejected for specified reasons. The messages that I supplied are not bad.

• abuse -- to send back when rejecting banned users
• crosspost -- to send back when rejecting for megacrossposting
• charter -- to send back when rejecting for violating requirements of the charter that are checked automatically
• signature -- to send back when rejecting for bogus PGP signature.

Example:

offtopic::Message is grossly off topic (spam, turks, etc)
charter::Technical violation of charter (binary, exc. quoting)
harassing::Message of harassing/insulting/hatemongering content

Testing Your Setup

To test your newsgroup, first write to ichudov @ algebra . com , and ask me to create a newsgroup account for you in webstump. Please tell me your newsgroup name and the approved address (such as csfm-approved@your.site.com). Free WebSTUMP is located at

http://freewebstump.algebra.com/stump-cgi/webstump.cgi

You should test your setup of the robomoderator very extensively. If the robomod fails when your group goes to production, you will be ashamed. When you are testing, look at file $HOME/Mail/from, which contains all standard error output of your programs. Try to send submissions by email to your moderation address. Do

Choosing a "victim" group

Edit file etc/modenv and put misc.jobs.misc in the assignment to NEWSGROUP, for testing purposes.

Things to Test