The mensa.* hierarchy is a collection of newsgroups for Mensa members worldwide. It is available free of charge to any site that wants it, and there are no restrictions on its distribution. It is currently carried by many sites such as UUNET, PIPEX (UK), and Sprint. It is very likely that a site that already feeds you has the groups and can feed them to you. These instructions assume you are using some variant of INN. Other news servers are quite different.

    control.ctl

    All control messages are sent by usenet@newsgate.mensa.org, and are PGP signed using David Lawrence's pgpcontrol scripts.

    The key ID is 'mensa.config', and its fingerprint is: 

    pub  1024/62DE6E0D 1997/08/25 mensa.config
          Key fingerprint =  A7 57 24 49 C0 D4 47 33  84 A0 52 6E F1 A4 00 5B
    Here is the mensa.* hierarchy key.

    Something like this would be ideal for your control.ctl file:

    newgroup:usenet@newsgate.mensa.org:mensa.*:verify-mensa.config rmgroup:usenet@newsgate.mensa.org:mensa.*:verify-mensa.config checkgroups:usenet@newsgate.mensa.org:mensa.*:verify-mensa.config

    If you are not using PGP verification, then this should work as well:

    newgroup:usenet@newsgate.mensa.org:mensa.*:doit rmgroup:usenet@newsgate.mensa.org:mensa.*:doit checkgroups:usenet@newsgate.mensa.org:mensa.*:doit

    newsgroups

    The current (as of 8/30/97) list of newsgroups is: 
    mensa.config            Mensa newsgroups config and policy discussions. (Moderated)
mensa.sigs.giftedchildren       A forum for parents, teachers, and children. (Moderated)
mensa.talk.misc         General Mensa discussion. (Moderated)
mensa.au.announce       Australian Mensa announcements. (Moderated)
mensa.au.events         Australian Mensa events. (Moderated)
mensa.de.announce       German Mensa announcements. (Moderated)
mensa.de.events         German Mensa events. (Moderated)
mensa.uk.announce       British Mensa announcements. (Moderated)
mensa.uk.events         British Mensa events. (Moderated)
mensa.us.announce       American Mensa announcements. (Moderated)
mensa.us.events         American Mensa events. (Moderated)
    Here is a ready-made checkgroups message you can feed into your news server to create the hierarchy in one easy step. Just download this file and do something like:

    inews -h < mensa-groups.txt

    moderators

    If you use individual listings in your moderators file, the entry for mensa.* should be:

    mensa.*:%s@newsgate.mensa.org

    mensa.* is also listed in the master moderators.uu.net/uunet.uu.net database, so if you are using one of them as your moderator address that should work fine as well.


    For more information, please contact the Mensa news administrator at usenet@newsgate.mensa.org.