🚀 go-pugleaf

	davisy@DOPEY.CS.UNC.EDU (York Davis) wants to create an
unmoderated sun newsgroup.  There already exists a moderated group,
comp.sys.sun, which is just a redistribution of the Sun-Spots Digest
mailing list.  York complains about comp.sys.sun:

> a) posting via the moderated newsgroup is slow -- the moderator lets
> messages sit around too long before posting to comp.sys.sun.

	As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest reason to go
unmoderated.  Sometime's it's weeks between the time I post an article
and I see it come back to me on the newsgroup, after finding it's way
to the moderator, getting digestified, etc.  It really makes the group
almost worthless.  It's almost impossible to carry on a coherent
conversation when the lag time is so great.  If I have a problem about
which I want to pick some brains, by the time my query gets out the
the general public, more often than not I've found some way to solve
the problem myself in the intervening couple of weeks.  On
unix-wizards, it's not uncommon to have an answer the next morning, or
sometimes even later that day!

> b) moderated newsgroups cannot be read and processed on an article-
> by-article basis with rn and various other news-reading programs.

	Well, part of the problem has to do with the digest format,
not with the moderation.  You can have a moderatred, but not
digestified group if you want.

> c) Many people, myself included, object to moderation on principle
> and to the moderation in comp.sys.sun in particular.

	I'm not sure moderation is always an evil thing.  In many
cases, it works very well (RISKS comes to mind).  But in this case, I
agree, moderation just doesn't work.  The purpose of having a
sun-specific group would be served much better if it were
unmoderatred, like comp.unix.wizards.

> 2) I suggest comp.sys.sun.unmod as a name for this group.

	Can't we come up with a better name?  Maybe the thing to do
would be to just make comp.sys.sun the free-for-all unmoderated group.
Since it probably makes sense to keep the Sun-Spots Digests around, we
could move that to comp.sys.sun.digest or comp.sys.sun.spots, or some
other subgroup.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016