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Cleanfeed - Usenet Filtering

Table Of Contents

1. Installation and Upgrading
2. Cleanfeed Files Explained
3. Configuration Parameters
3.1. Regular Expressions
3.2. Newsgroup Counters and Flags
4. Global Bad Hosts
5. Frequently Asked Questions

Overview

Cleanfeed is Usenet filter written in Perl. It is designed to integrate with a variety of news applications, although in recent times has been primarily tested against INN v2. In order to use it, INN must be compiled with Perl support:
./configure --with-perl
Perl version 5.8 or later is also strongly recommended.

History

Cleanfeed was originally developed by Jeremy Nixon who maintained it until 1998. At that time futher developments were taken on by Marco D'Itri who produced the last release in August 2001, with a beta version following in May 2002. I produced a couple of updates in December 2007 that were designed to address hipcrime type floods that were plaguing some groups I followed at the time. In accordance with Cleanfeed's license, I published these and announced them in news.software.nntp. The announcement is archived on Google Groups

This update was met with surprising enthusiasm and resulted in other people posting a number of updates and bugfixes that I subsequently included. From that time I've done some other updates and produced these webpages to guide newcomers in using Cleanfeed.

I'd like to thank Jeremy and Marco for their work on Cleanfeed and also all the regulars of news.software.nntp who have offered encouragement, patches and suggestions since I made my first update. Without all these people, Cleanfeed wouldn't be such a useful tool as it is today.

Assumptions