XPost: news.groups

Except for the occasional technical difficulties with moderation, this newsgroup is working fine. Moderation ensures that the off-topic posts
which clutter news.groups and many other newsgroups do not appear in news.groups.proposals.

Would recommend that Big-8 continue their work on streamlining and
modernizing the moderation system.

Also important is to consider the objective of Usenet: to facilitate discussion. Everything else is just overhead.

Finally, I wonder if there are enough users posting to news.groups and news.groups.proposals to generate any meaningful discussion on what
course of action should be taken: new groups, removing old groups, etc.

A lot of the discussion is repetitive and predictable, coming from the
same small group of users.

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So long as there's still spam going to news.groups then I think the
moderation is worthwhile, if maintaining it is at all possible.

More recent 'noise' in alt.config from troll posting is also worth
considering.

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On 2022-05-23, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

So long as there's still spam going to news.groups then I think the moderation is worthwhile, if maintaining it is at all possible.

More recent 'noise' in alt.config from troll posting is also worth considering.

I think this all comes down to what the "succession plan" for
Moderation is. What happens if a moderator just becomes unavailable?
Do we have a "dead man's switch" which kicks in and bumps the group to unmoderated? Given current posting levels and the sophistication of
current users with using kill/scorefiles, I find myself agreeing with
the RFD, unless there's a contingency in place for absent moderators.

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On Thu, 26 May 2022 14:54:19 CST, meff wrote:

I think this all comes down to what the "succession plan" for Moderation
is. What happens if a moderator just becomes unavailable?

We have a procedure for finding new moderators if a moderator just quits without notice. To become a moderator to begin with, we do suggest that a
group has a "moderation team" so that others can take off.

Do we have a "dead man's switch" which kicks in and bumps the group to unmoderated?

No, newsgroups can not realistically be converted from moderated to
unmoderated or vice versa. The reason for that is that it would require
the deletion of the moderated group and then have that group replaced with
an unmoderated group. Many news server do not honor control messages for
the deletion of groups and therefore it would not be possible for users of those servers to participate in that group at all.

Given current posting levels and the sophistication of current users
with using kill/scorefiles, I find myself agreeing with the RFD, unless there's a contingency in place for absent moderators.

If the current board were to step down tomorrow, and we lost access to the moderation server that we use, all of the groups that we moderate would
stop working.

A little history:

Around 2013 the board did go away. All of the members stepped down or let
their memberships lapse. In 2020, the new board stepped in with approval
from the members of the previous board and we started moderating again. We
try to be as transparent as we can. That's why this article was sent. We
don't want to just make changes to how we operate without getting the
Usenet community involved and if one of us needed to step down, there
would be a public announcement and we would work hard to keep the board
going.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)