In article <Pine.GSO.3.95.970502190150.26959A-100000 at holyrood.ed.ac.uk>,
Anthonie Muller <awjm at holyrood.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 1 May 1997, Joe Felsenstein wrote:
>> > In article <5ka2t5$63r at news.u-strasbg.fr>,
> > Francois JEANMOUGIN <jeanmougin at igbmc.u-strasbg.fr> wrote:
> > >In article <5k9qoq$22h at mserv1.dl.ac.uk>,
> > > James McInerney <J.McInerney at nhm.ac.uk> writes:
>> [snip]
>> > > I suggested this to Joe last year, because I'm already losing
> > >lot of tiome on news, and when I go in such of my favorite newsgroup,
> > >I'm a little bit disapointed that the only messages available are not
> > >about molecular biology of evolution, but religion
> > >... Another soution could be a moderator...
> >
> [deleted]
>> it is clearly now time
> > to moderate this newsgroup, so the creationist debaters can go back to
> > talk.origins where their discussion properly belongs.
>> > I don't think that calling it "bionet.molbio.phylogeny" (I am using the US
> > forms of the newsgroup names) would have any effect on the creationists
> > as they ignore the "molbio" in the newsgroup name anyway and post lots of
> > stuff that is not related to molecules at all.
> >
> > I do not have time to be the moderator. Do we have a volunteer? When
we do,
> > we can get the process started. Until then our bandwidth will continue
> > to be monopolized by that same innocent student and that same old set
> > of questions.
> >
> > --
> > Joe Felsenstein joe at genetics.washington.edu (IP No.
128.95.12.41)
> > Dept. of Genetics, Univ. of Washington, Box 357360, Seattle, WA
98195-7360 USA
>> Hi Joe
>> I am working on a thermodynamic origin of life model, and I am
> therefore very annoyed by all the false noise made by the creationists.
>> Obviously no one will have the time to act as moderator. On the other had
> it should not be too difficult to do it if the work was split in many
> parts: it is easy to smell a creatinist.
> How about setting up a rotation system? If you have enough
> volunteers moderation should not be such an effort at all. We could
> simply start with making a list of people that we know personally, and
> than hand over the job each of them for say two weeks. Even if a creationist
> slips in, it should be easy to weed him out, and the 'damage' should only
> be temporary.
>> Most creationists seem to be Americans. Is it somehow possible to moderate
> American messages only? Or to moderate only those messages send out at
> normal American working times?
>
Ooh, that's an ugly bit of parochialism -- I thought only us Americans
could be that insensitive to other nationalities :-)
I also don't like the idea to set up an "in" group, a list of acceptable
authors -- that's a good way to weed out novel ideas. The only way to do
this is to have a liberal moderator who allows most of the posts through,
but only weeds out the most blatant examples of content-free nonsense, be
they American, British, German, or whatever (and I acknowledge that most
will be American...but I think you'll also find that there are a few
intelligent posters on this side of the Atlantic, too).
--
Paul Z. Myers
http://fishnet.bio.temple.edu/
