Below are some answers to various questions we have been asked that we haven't put the answers to anywhere else in the manual.

1. How do moderated discussions work?
2. How exactly does the "Use direct connection if possible" checkbox in the Windows client work?
3. Can I edit individual user preferences?
4. We're getting some "inappropriate" online-status messages set by users. Can I turn off the custom-message feature? If so, can the administrator add custom messages which would be available to all? Also, how can I turn off (at the server level) the idle time message next to the user name?

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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
   
   
   
   
4. We're getting some "inappropriate" online-status messages set by users. Can I turn off the custom-message feature? If so, can the administrator add custom messages which would be available to all? Also, how can I turn off (at the server level) the idle time message next to the user name?
   
   Sorry, but there is no way to turn off this feature.
   
   There are user preferences to show online-status messages and idle times in the menus and friends lists, but there is no user preference to remove the status message from the instant message composition window. You can change the default preference values and/or update the preferences for all existing users as server administrator. In the default preferences section, the preferences 133, 182, 185, 186 are the ones you would be interested in.