=head1 NAME

active.times - List of local creation times of newsgroups

=head1 DESCRIPTION

The file I<pathdb>/active.times provides a chronological record of when
newsgroups were created on the local server.  This file is normally
updated by B<mod-active> and B<innd> whenever a newgroup control message
is processed or a C<ctlinnd newgroup> command is issued, and is used
by B<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 B<ctlinnd> command line, or the newsmaster specified
at configure time if no creator argument was given to B<ctlinnd> (by
default, it is C<usenet>).

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

=head1 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
C<convdate -dc 1175716803> (convdate(1) is shipped with INN) or
C<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 C<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.

=head1 HISTORY

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

=head1 SEE ALSO

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

=cut
