🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <11054@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:

[ lots of good arguments against moderation, but ... ]

   In summary, a mod group doesn't provide any benefit over an unmod
   group, and it provides an additional point of control which can and
   will be abused to provide obscurity rather than security.

Your points are well taken, however I'm still not convinced that
moderation is an Evil Thing. How many times have you seen Dire
Warnings about the Evils of the emacs mailer interface posted to groups
hither and yon ??  These are the sort of things that a moderator
would keep out of the newsgroup.

For the group to work, you have to maintain a high signal to noise
ratio. Sysadmins will only pay attention if they know the quality
of the postings are high. Given the nature of the postings, I would
want to be pretty careful about installing a "new and improved"
version of {su,passwd,ls,whatever} from joe_average_hacker@foo.baz.
An experienced system administrator would know to look closely at
the code before installing it, however the not so experienced
system administrators (the people who this group would cater to)
might not know to do the same (ie a bad case of blind trust). Therefore,
there has to be some sort of filter for bogus postings.

Moderation has the potential to be abused, but then again, so do most
things in life. I prefer "innocent 'til proven guilty" and not the
other way around.

I guess the bset example of what I'm talking about is news.groups
versus news.newgroups. Both talk about the same thing - which one
do *you* read?
--
Lyndon Nerenberg  CF6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University
     {alberta,decwrl}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA