Greetings.
On 02/03/2022 22.51, Grant Taylor wrote:
On 2/7/22 4:39 AM, Tristan Miller wrote:
Rationale for removal:
The current moderator of record for the newsgroups, Kathy Morgan, had
taken over moderatorship after the previous moderators had
disappeared. She reports to the Big-8 Management Board that during
her tenure as moderator, the groups were not successful "because they
never again received an adequate number of submissions to make a
viable group". She attributes this to former community members having
moved on to other forums. She furthermore writes, "I posted asking
users if there was any desire to keep the groups and IIRC received
just one response and that was in the negative. I would like to see
them removed, since there is no longer interest in the groups and I no
longer have access to moderate them."
I have qualms with the "I no longer have access to moderate them."
comment. That sounds like a /technical/ /problem/ to me. I believe a /technical/ /problem/ deserves a /technical/ /solution/. I believe that
a removing a group in response to a technical problem is the wrong thing
to do.
Please clarify if I'm misunderstanding.
My understanding is that Kathy long ago determined that the groups were moribund, and only later lost the technical means to moderate them
herself. So the fact that she can no longer run the moderation software
is irrelevant. Even if she were willing and able to run the moderation software, the groups wouldn't see any traffic, at least according to her assessment.
Of course, if you or anyone else thinks that one or both groups could be revived, and if you are or know someone who is willing to serve as
moderator (and who has the means to set this up technically), then we
could pursue that solution instead.
Inspection of the two groups on public servers reveals that no new
articles have been posted since May 2017; in the three years prior to
that, only a handful of articles per year had been posted to either
group.
As a newsmaster, I see virtually no reason to remove a newsgroup from my
news servers. IMHO there is exceedingly little to be gained by removing
a mostly idle group.
The most compelling reason to remove a moderated group without a
moderator (and without any prospects of finding a new moderator) is that
users get confused, frustrated, or angry when their submissions
disappear into the bit bucket.
Given the nature of the seemingly technical problem, particularly
related to moderation, I would counter with the possibility of removing moderation from the newsgroups in question.
Your proposal is covered by the Board's FAQ "What is 'demoderation'?" at <
https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderated_Newsgroups#What_is_.27demoderation.27.3F>.
There's also the somewhat related FAQ "How does one change an
Unmoderated group to a Moderated group?" at <
https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Moderated_Newsgroups#How_does_one_change_an_Unmoderated_group_to_a_Moderated_group.3F>.
Historically, the Board has avoided changing the moderation status of
groups because not all news servers honour the change, resulting in inconsistent (and therefore confusion-inducing) behaviour. I gather
that this problem is more severe when changing from unmoderated to
moderated, though the present Board members have been advised (by former
Board members and associated technical staff) to avoid changing groups
from moderated to unmoderated.
The Board would certainly be willing to entertain acting against this
advice in this case, though for this to happen we'd probably want to be satisfied that changing the moderation status would actually result in
the group becoming active again.
Regards,
Tristan
--
Usenet Big-8 Management Board
https://www.big-8.org/
board@big-8.org
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)