Moderating groups (was Grrr! )

[Reinhard Doelz]

Keith Robison (robison at lipid.harvard.edu) wrote:
: Tom Schneider (toms at kaylor.ncifcrf.gov) wrote:

: : So what is the general opinion?

Go for moderation whereever you can afford it economically in academia. E.g., 
bionet.software.www is moderated, and this group is particularly susceptible 
due to the 'fashionable' www name in it. All .newsrc mail spam programs with 
'www' as targed end up in tis group as well. Effort is increasing and 
eventually the required resources for moderation might no longer be avaibable.
Only then the benefit of moderation will be noticed :-) and the obvious 
measure to cope with this is to introduce a subhierarchy where you have an 
bionet.software.www.announce which is then moderated as value-added group 
with lower traffic.

In a non-commercial world it is difficult to imagine that added-value services
are (a) reliable (b) authenticated and (c) free. The combination of all that 
is worth charging for it. Academia might not be prepared to acknowledge this, 
specifically, as examples of commercialized newsgroups found their
niche in business and advertisement and not in 'general science'.  

: One solution to consider (though I have no clue if the code exists)
: would a simple scheme of automoderation:  

: 	1. We consider b.i-t a simple little club (it is after all! :-).  
: 	2. Member's posts are automatically passed through.
: 	3. You get to be a member by making _one_ on-topic post.

One of the mailing lists which we happen to manage runs through a general 
filter to reduce noise caused by subscription messages. Anything else 
would be dangerous as the automatism might delete messages which have the 
banned wording in it accidentially. The most robust checker is a human 
after all, and writing a simulator program for a human is a project of its 
own :-) 


Regards
Reinhard Doelz


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