🚀 go-pugleaf

"Keith A. Glass" <salgak@huskynet.com> writes:

 > > Ah. You propose the creation of a Cabal. Who will be the Cabal? shall
 > > the membership of the Cabal be open, or occult from view?
 > 
 > Actually, I was thinking in terms of you and Dave Aronson for starters, 
 > I've also had an offer of robomoderation. . . .

Me???  Bzzzzzt.  Wrong answer.  But thank you for playing our game.  I'm
flattered, but no thanks -- not only because I don't want the headaches,
but also because I don't like the concept, as it would be executed.

I don't like at all the Usenet model of moderation.  Too bad the ISPs
are too uncooperative, and newsgroups too difficult to start, for the
Fidonet model.  (A Fidonet moderator does NOT pre-screen all posts!  He
posts the rules at least once a month, and is authorized to warn or
EJECT people who break them, by ordering their sysops to bar them, upon
pain of having their feed for that echo cut.  A common solution to
"rogue" moderators is to start a competing echo, which is easy.  In such
cases, the populace votes with their feet, er, fingertips.  Often, BOTH
echoes survive and flourish.  Sometimes, the bad moderator resigns, is
replaced by a better one, and the new one is withdrawn.  Or, the old one
withers away as the new one steals all the users.  In any case, it is
usually all resolved quickly and peacefully to the satisfaction of all.)

IMHO, next best is pure robomoderation.  No delay while a human screens
posts (followed by a huge dump of posts when the mod finally has time
for it), no need for a human to make reading the news a high priority,
(c'mon, get a LIFE!), and best of all, no arguing over whether or not
something was off-topic, or commercial, or whatever.  There may be
arguing over what the rules *should be*, but once they've been written
down, there is no question over whether a post fit them.

 > The news-admin community isn't an issue here, it's the admin of the
 > dc.hierarchy
 > that comes into play here.  I had merely suggested it, to conserve
 > bandwidth:
 > when you effectively take a group moderated, you wipe the original. . .

Which is exactly what you've been accused of.  This is essentially what
some refer to as "retromoderation".  Some use it to mean retroactively
making a group moderated; some mean cancelling posts ex-post-facto (so
to speak) rather than pre-screening them.  Either one is often
considered a Bad Thing among the news-admin community.  (Tho the latter
is a power that, as a Fidonet moderator, I have often WISHED for!)  It's
all the more frowned upon when you seem to be doing an end-run around
the normal process (basically, put it to a formal vote re whether to
make an existing group modded).  True, you wouldn't be dealing with the
n-a's at large, but you should be prepared for the kind of attitude
you're likely to run into (from *any* typical n-a) WRT these concepts.

 > The future is moderated groups, if for nothing else than to cut down
 > the noise level from spams. . .

Yes -- and a lot of that can be done by robomods.

-- 
Dave Aronson, Sysop, Air 'n Sun (airnsun.pcbuddy.com) @ +1-703-319-0714
Opinions MINE, not by GeoCities/Template/Mensa/NRA/SCA/CAUCE/USGov/God!
Support Rep. Smith's no-spam bill, NOT Sen. Murkowski's spam-is-OK one!
See my website, http://listen.to/davearonson (last updated 1998-08-27).