First of all let me say that the decision to post this message was not an
easy one. These postings about moderation are actually getting to be a
bigger nuisance than spam... I only do this because I was one of the people
who originated it and my name got cited in subsequent postings. However,
this will be my last public contribution to the discussion about
moderation.
==MY POSITION ON THE SUBJECT==
I am in favour of moderation.
I do not want to be a moderator.
==SOME ANALYSIS==
There are three types of readers here:
1- those who only subscribe to the mailing list BTK-MCA and get all
postings via email
2- those who only read and post on the usenet newsgroup bionet.metabolic-reg
3- those (as me) who both subscribe to the list and read the newsgroup
(there are occasionally messages that appear on one and not the other!)
Those in group 1 seem to be mostly for moderation because they get all the
spam in their mailboxes. Those in group 2 seem to be mostly against
moderation because the price of ignoring spam is much less for them than
the possibility of relevant postings being censored. Finally people in
group 3 (like me) suffer with the spam but are not so hard pressed to have
moderation because they are in the position of unsubscribing to the mailing
list and just read the newsgroup if they really need to.
Is this an indication that the two methods of propagating the messages are
somewhat in conflict?
On 5 Feb 97 at 12:23, John Woods wrote:
> [...] and we could always have another group, say alt.metabolic-reg, for
> diehard libertarians.
This proposal by John Woods is actually quite sensible. After all that is
what the alt.* hyerarchy exists for (alternative!).
On 5 Feb 97 at 21:47, C. J. Fields wrote:
> Once this group goes moderated, then what's next? Bionet.microbiology?
> All bionet groups? All usenet groups?
The BIOSCI organization (that is behind the bionet.* newsgroups and mailing
lists) actually encourages moderation to be setup in their newsgroups as a
means of reducing spam. Many other non-bionet newsgroups are also
moderated, some just to reduce the amount of postings (for example
comp.lang.c.moderated as comp.lang.c has a flux of some 200 messages per
day). The following 36 (in a total of 98) bionet newsgroups are all
moderated:
bionet.prof-society.afcr
bionet.prof-society.aibs,
bionet.neuroscience.amyloid
bionet.genome.arabidopsis
bionet.prof-society.ascb
bionet.genome.autosequencing
bionet.announce
bionet.journals.contents
bionet.prof-society.biophysics
bionet.journals.letters.biotechniques
bionet.software.www
bionet.chlamydomonas
bionet.biology.computational
bionet.prof-society.csm
bionet.biology.deepsea
bionet.diagnostics
bionet.ecology.physiology
bionet.emf-bio
bionet.jobs.offered
bionet.prof-society.faseb
bionet.molecules.free-radicals
bionet.genome.gene-structure
bionet.molbio.genome-program
bionet.cellbiol.insulin
bionet.molbio.molluscs
bionet.prof-society.navbo
bionet.photosynthesis
bionet.plants.signaltransduc
bionet.organisms.schistosoma
bionet.sci-resources
bionet.biology.symbiosis
bionet.journals.letters.tibs
bionet.organisms.urodeles
bionet.biology.vectors
bionet.virology
Now let's have some scientific discussions!
Pedro Mendes.
Pedro Mendes Inst. Biological Sciences
prm at aber.ac.uk (home: pedro at enzyme.demon.co.uk) Univ. Wales, Aberystwyth,
http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/pedro/prmhome.htm Dyfed SY23 3DA, U.K.
http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/softw/gepasi.html FAX: +44 (0)1970 622350
